The author’s eventful life provides the subject matter for stories pierced with loneliness and shame in a collection of great emotional range
Lucia Berlin’s short stories were not well known during her lifetime. A few collections published by small presses between the 70s and 90s won a tiny but devoted band of admirers including Lydia Davis and Saul Bellow. The 43 stories brought together in A Manual for Cleaning Women make a powerful claim for far wider recognition and celebration of her talents.
Berlin appeared to fit many lives into her 68 years. Brought up in the remote mining camps of Alaska and the mid-west, she was an abused and lonely child in wartime Texas; a rich and privileged young woman in Santiago; a bohemian loft-living hipster in 50s New York; and an ER nurse in 70s inner-city Oakland. By the age of 32 she had been married three times, had four sons and was battling a chronic alcohol addiction.
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