![]() The engrossing world of Berlin’s fiction is, as her son Mark admits, inspired by her own life. Two thousand admirers is far too few for Berlin’s staggering talent. Berlin’s language is succinct and tightly focused, its effects on the reader immediate, saturating, and her imagery is crystalline in its formation on the page and in the reader’s mind. As Stephen Emerson, the collection’s editor, put it, while Berlin has had “one or two thousand dedicated readers… that is far too few.” Emerson is right. Most readers, even those who take pleasure in rediscovering forgotten genius, will not be familiar with her work. Lucia said this didn’t matter: the story is the thing.”Ī Manual for Cleaning Women collects forty-three of Lucia Berlin’s stories written “sporadically,” as the book jacket specifies, throughout the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. “Our family stories and memories have been slowly reshaped, embellished and edited to the extent that I’m not sure what really happened all the time. ![]() “Ma wrote true stories, not necessarily autobiographical, but close enough for horseshoes,” wrote Mark Berlin, one of Lucia’s four sons, on a memorial website published upon her death in 2004, a day that happened to be her 68th birthday. ![]()
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