Welcome home A memoir with selected photographs and letters

Lucia Berlin

Book - 2018

"Letters, photographs, and diaries from the author of A Manual for Cleaning Women"--

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BIOGRAPHY/Berlin, Lucia
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Subjects
Genres
Autobiographies
Published
New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2018.
Language
English
Main Author
Lucia Berlin (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
ix, 162 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 22 cm
ISBN
9780374287597
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

THE DAY LUCIA BERLIN was born, in Juneau, Alaska, in 1936, an avalanche wiped out a third of the town, or so she later wrote. Mythic stories gravitated to her, and in death she acquired one more: that of a writer who died too young and went unrecognized in her lifetime. In truth, when she died, at 68 in 2004, she had published 76 stories and six collections, for which she received several prizes. And yet, just as in her writing, the myth is truer than the truth. She should have written more. She should have been more celebrated. In 2015 Farrar, Straus & Giroux published "A Manual for Cleaning Women," a 400-page volume of her re-collected tales. It was rapturously received: Here was a writer's writer who, at the same time, had tremendous popular appeal. The book made the New York Times best-seller list. She was canonized alongside Richard Yates and Raymond Carver, and her own heroes, William Carlos Williams and Chekhov. And yet, Berlin is not only a soulful chronicler of the lost corners of America, whose semi-autobiographical stories brim with red caliche clay, arroyos, drainage ditches and smelter towns. She is not only a writer of vivid bursts of language: "Pete scowled; dominoes clicked. The daiquiris were strong. Cold, cold, delicious!" She is also a distinctly female voice, a raspy Marlene Dietrich. She was a beautiful woman who dared to know it, who could feel a bullet zing against the car and say, "'Hot damn!' . . . An adventure," and also write, with urgent honesty, of motherhood and love. In death, she became the patron saint of every coastal cool girl, every exhausted mother, every daydreamer of plane tickets, every chaser of her next broken heart. The simultaneous publication of a new volume of old stories, "Evening in Paradise," and an unfinished memoir (along with photographs and letters), "Welcome Home," is an event sure to be greeted with elation. Some lives seem predestined to be shaped into stories, and Berlin's contained infinite chapters. She spent her childhood in small mining towns across the Northwest, where her father worked as an engineer. Then, while he served in World War II, she and her mother went down to Texas. When she was 13, her father moved the family to Santiago, Chile. She attended the University of New Mexico, then zigzagged from New York to California, through alcoholism and detox centers, through odd jobs (substitute teacher, hospital ward clerk, phone operator, cleaning woman), through three husbands and four sons and many other men, for whom she had a weakness nearly as great as that for drinking. Though her first collection didn't appear until she was 45, she began to write in earnest in her early 20s. Homesick for Chile, she wrote to remember, until each flower appeared in front of her. Toward the end of her life, as a writing instructor in Colorado, she was interviewed by two students for a school assignment. They asked her if she wrote for joy. She told them, "I just wrote to - to go home." The vast majority of Berlin's stories include a description of a house, as rich and textured as if it were a character. It's no surprise, then, that when she sat down to write her memoir, she organized her material by place (and no surprise, either, that she omitted the less sensual truth of dates and years). The memoir ends midsentence, unfinished at the time of her death. The rest of the book consists of letters, most to her friend and mentor the Black Mountain poet Ed Dorn, and a list titled "The Trouble With All the Houses I've Lived In." Written in the late 1980s, in terse staccato prose, that list is the skeleton key to the rest of her work. It begins: "Juneau, Alaska - Avalanche the day I was born, wiped out a third of town. / Deerlodge, Montana - No heat, just the oven. Earthquake." The list picks up speed and pathos as it goes on: "Paper-thin walls. Mama crying crying"; "Dust storms. Old man died in the apple orchard"; "Pump broke, well went dry, wiring blew, chickens died, rabbits died, termites, goat broke leg. Shot her"; "I burned it down"; "Eight people, two bedrooms. Toilet overflowed. Sewer line broke. Evicted"; "Police. Fire next door. Evicted"; It ends in Oakland, with these words: "No catastrophe. So far." The list of houses is the bare-knuckled spine holding together a body of work in which each story shows you a single detail, in high definition. In Berlin's stories, her alter ego changes names - Maya, Laura, Maggie - but the scattershot particulars of her life hold constant. In "La Barca de la Ilusión," Maya attempts to keep Buzz (an analogue for Buddy Berlin, her third husband and great love) away from the vicious heroin dealers who trail him through Mexico. When one shows up in their secluded paradise, Maya "didn't speak or think. She stabbed him in the stomach with the paring knife. Blood gushed down his white sharkskin pants. He laughed at her, grabbed a rag." The image slips a knife into the reader: Maya's determination and helplessness laid bare. As the two men shoot up by the fire, Maya watches from the bed. The dealer pitches forward into the flames, overdosed, dead. Buzz dozes. Maya hauls the corpse into a canoe and pushes it out into the bay. In "The Wives," the character Laura says, in passing: "I once stabbed a connection, in Yelapa. I didn't even hurt him, really. But I felt the blade go in, saw him bleed." The woman she is speaking to puts on a Charlie Parker record and changes the subject. In her memoir, the section on Yelapa ends: "All young, handsome exbeach boys, smart and mean. Whispers in our garden, laughter in the dark by the datura tree." In the list of houses, Yelapa becomes simply: "Sharks, scorpions, coconut grove - THUD THUD - three kids. Hurricane." The knife, the inevitable tragedy of addiction, the dealer's corpse: THUD THUD. In the list of houses, one sees just how forcefully she can compress. But the magic of Berlin's stories is in their luxurious expansion, in the unexpected places she chooses to begin and end. It's no surprise that she was a beloved teacher - her stories teach. They sprawl, they play the trick of showing their seams. It seems a strange irony that Berlin died on Nov. 12, the same day she was born; she would never have wanted an ending so neat. In "Noel: 1974," two fellow teachers drop by Maggie's house and find it filled with lostboy friends of her sons, all smoking dope. "How can you have such a loose lifestyle and be so rigid a teacher?" they ask her. Maggie never answers the question, but a few lines later, another character interrupts by passing them a tray of suggestively named candy: "Have some divinity." "I write to fix a reality," Berlin told the students who interviewed her. I don't think she meant "fix" as in "amend," but "fix" as in "affix," to keep in place. There are lines of unforgettable lucidity that carry over near verbatim from the memoir to the stories. "I held the hot part of the cup and gave him the handle" becomes "She did things like hold the hot part of the cup when she passed him coffee, offering him the handle." For a raconteur like Berlin, it seems likely that the stories influenced the memoir as much as the reverse. "One day in class, I read a passage where one of Cervantes's characters, in an insane asylum, says that he could make it rain whenever he felt like it," Berlin writes in her memoir. "I understood in that moment that writers could do anything they wanted to do." The classroom scene appears in "Andado: A Gothic Romance," one of the strongest stories in "Evening in Paradise." Fourteen-year-old Laura is studying "Don Quixote," and her teacher, believing she hasn't read the book, quizzes her on the passage: "Laura smiled. She had just seen it. I'll rain whenever I feel like it." The scene ends here; the main event of the story is a weekend trip Laura takes to the vacation home of one of her father's business contacts. On the train ride there, the man slips his arm around Laura to steady her. "This would never happen to her again. When she grew older she would always be in control, even when being submissive. This would be the first and last time anyone took over herself," Berlin writes. It rains virtually the entire weekend. After their horse-drawn carriage slips offa bridge into an icy river, the man tells Laura to strip offher clothes and, in his words, ruins her. Is the story Berlin's way of reasserting control over events of her own life? Did it rain the night she was "ruined"? It doesn't matter. As Berlin wrote in a letter to Dorn, "It's raining here now, drizzling and downpouring - not today but in general." It rained in general. It rained whenever she felt like it. 0 NADJA SPIEGELMAN is the author of the memoir "I'm Supposed to Protect You From All This" and three comics for children, including "Lost in NYC: A Subway Adventure." She is the online editor at The Paris Review.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 9, 2018]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

The unique and captivating perspective prized by fans of Berlin (A Manual for Cleaning Women) is on haphazard but still-mesmerizing display in this nonfiction complement to her autobiographical short stories. Readers will recognize many real-life details mined for Berlin's fiction, here rendered in less finished form: the peripatetic childhood in mining towns; high-society high school days in Chile; her successive marriages to jazz musicians and friends Race and Buddy. The volume's first part consists of fragments from a memoir left unfinished at the time of her death in 2004, illustrated with numerous photographs. The second, stronger section presents select letters, many from her time living in New York City from 1959-1961. Although more editorial context would have been helpful, the (too few) missives will fascinate fans with what seems a peek at the unvarnished Berlin, whose self-reflective ("I am still not proud and I am not yet humble") and candid ("We are laughing now, in debt and broke and sickly") voice comes roaring through. For the uninitiated, starting with editor Stephen Emerson's concluding biographical sketch would be a good entrée; even better would be to read Berlin's stories and then return to this work with new appreciation. Agent: Katherine Fausset, Curtis Brown. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Tantalizing glimpses into the life of a recently-discovered writer.More than a decade after Berlin (1936-2004) died, A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories was published, and she began to find readers (Manual was a finalist for the 2015 Kirkus Prize). In a biographical note that first appeared in Manual, Stephen Emerson writes that Berlin lived a "rather flamboyant existence." This book is certainly evidence of that. The first part is an unfinished memoir chronologically organized by the places she lived, with photographs from her son. It's the story of a child, then woman, who lived an itinerant existence. Born in Alaska to a father who had to travel for work, the family moved to Idaho and then Kentucky, Montana, Idaho, Texas, and elsewhere. Berlin describes each home in exquisite, imagistic language, providing insights into how her unique writing style evolved. In Helena, a man's cabin is "an unpainted hut, really, with windows that looked like eyes and a door that was a goofy crooked smile." In a list of more than 30 of her residences, she crisply describes eache.g., "House Edward Abbey had lived in. Only one burner worked. Filthy." And later: "No catastrophe. So far." A lengthy stay in Santiago, Chile, where she learned Spanish, went well, but her life was filled with hardship, alcoholism, drunken and addicted husbands, and money problems. There's very little here about her reading and writing, but clearly, the life lived is the inspiration for her stories. The second part contains letters written from 1944 to 1965 revealing a conflicted, anguished young writer. Most are to friend and mentor Ed Dorn, the Black Mountain School poet. In college, she wrote Dorn about sudden ambitions, and in the same letter, "I'm just so fouled up." In 1960: "I am so miserable. I have never been so afraid and unhappy.I believeI am a writereven believe that I am a good one."An excellent start to understanding a writer and her work. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.