'I can’t imagine anyone who wouldn’t want to read her' – Stephen Emerson on Lucia Berlin
Stephen Emerson was close friends with Lucia Berlin for 25 years, and as the editor of her posthumously published A Manual for Cleaning Women, there is perhaps no one better placed to celebrate her life and her joyful writing.
A writer of great emotional range, and remembered as 'one of America's best kept secrets', Lucia Berlin was relatively unknown during her lifetime. Stephen Emerson met Lucia in the 1970s and remained a close friend until her untimely death in 2004. The two wrote to each other for decades, and when putting the collection together in 2013 Stephen said 'her letters were by far the most painful thing to go back to.'
In 2015, he selected 43 of her quietly-acclaimed stories for publication in A Manual for Cleaning Women. While Lucia's talent was never in question, no one expected the rampant success of the collection as the book climbed The New York Times bestseller list and sold hundreds of thousands of copies worldwide. Selected as part of the new Picador Collection series, A Manual for Cleaning Women is renowned for Lucia's pioneering autofiction style and her close-up portrayal of working women.
Here, Stephen reflects on this important work and Lucia's writing life, and shares his favourite excerpts from her stories.
‘Birds ate all the hollyhock and larkspur seeds I planted . . . sitting together all in a row like at a cafeteria.' ’
Letter to me, May 21, 1995
Lucia Berlin was as close a friend as I've ever had. She was also one of the most signal writers I've ever encountered.
The latter fact is what I want to write about here. Her extraordinary life – its color, its afflictions, and the heroism she showed especially in the fight against a brutal drinking habit.
Lucia's writing has got snap. When I think of it, I sometimes imagine a master drummer in motion behind a large trap set, striking ambidextrously at an array of snares, tom-toms, and ride cymbals while working pedals with both feet.
It isn't that the work is percussive, it's that there's so much going on.
The prose claws its way off the page. It has vitality. It reveals.
An odd little electric car, circa 1950:
‘It looked like any other car except that it was very tall and short, like a car in a cartoon that had run into a wall. A car with its hair standing on end.’
Elsewhere, outside Angel's Laundromat, where the travelers go: