Lucia Berlin: The Charm Of The Ordinary
Rediscovering her resilient voice and extraordinary stories
Lucia Berlin was an American writer who was born in Juneau, the capital of Alaska, on November 12th of 1936. She had a very unique life and, sometimes, complicated too. She lived in many places: El Paso, Santiago de Chile, Albuquerque, Nueva York, Ciudad de México. A nomad life, marked by instability and constant change. She had four kids that she took care of on her own for most of her life, while she worked countless hours in underpaid jobs and struggled against alcoholism and scoliosis that forced her to use an orthopedic corset. Nonetheless, amid all the chaos, she found time to write and she did it a lot; she managed to take time in her busy life to do what she loved. On the day of her birthday in the year 2004, she passed away in Marina del Rey due to lung cancer.
For many years she stayed unknown, her tales hidden between the creases of a canon that didn’t make space for her, until 2015, when Farrar, Straus and Giroux published A Manual for Cleaning Women, an anthology that includes 43 of her tales. Since then, there has been a radical change in the literary field: everyone fell in love with Lucia Berlin’s electric and sagacious prose. A writer that had been unfairly forgotten resurfaced and positioned herself as a core figure in contemporary literature. Her writing style made this possible; when you read one of her tales, it feels intimate, as if a friend was telling you a story, something that happened to her.
Her texts don’t intend to be edifying; on the contrary, they reproduce ordinary events and situations through an estranged perspective, that reflects how fragmentary and random human experience can be. Her characters can be delirious, philosophical, and funny, but always unique: each element in Lucia’s stories contains a particularity that manifests itself despite routine, in the comings and goings of everyday life.
To read one of Lucia’s stories is to enter –perhaps just peek into– a part of the intense world in which she lived, to catch a glimpse of that singular reality. That’s why usually her readers or literary critics say her work can be positioned in the genre of autofiction or intimate narrative. On a personal level, I don’t like to talk about her writing on these terms, because I think that it narrows down her stories to a mold with determined traits, a stereotype. I believe that to box a text on a specific genre means minimizing the unique world that it creates.
Her tales are set on an ordinary landscape where her characters are just regular people that are overwhelmed and tired of their routine or dealing with trauma. At the same time, all of these daily moments become singular and extraordinary under the narrator’s eye: in the story “My Jockey”, the narrator –who works in an emergency room– talks about jockeys’ X-rays with their broken bones and says “Their skeletons look like trees, like reconstructed brontosaurs. St. Sebastian’s X-rays.” Right there, in passages like that, lives what’s beautiful about Lucia Berlin’s writing: that estranged gaze that turns a skeleton into a brontosaur and awakens vitality in the events of daily life and finds charm in them. A color palette that prints and highlights beauty on the surface of routine.
Her stories portray a world where tragedy and drama are approached with humor, irony, love; where her characters are eccentric and strange. Everything is unpredictable in her tales: at one moment a lot can be happening, and in the next paragraph it isn’t anymore; events fade as the story progresses. Her prose embodies a vital motion that imitates the oscillation of human existence; it keeps the rhythm of spoken words, with its cadence, its pauses, digressions and jumps, which exceed the rules of punctuation or syntax. Lucia Berlin takes writing to another level and creates something new with it. There’s a mix of Spanish and English, and these words inhabit her texts without the need of being translated. Her stories end abruptly, they get suspended or interrupted by a writing that doesn’t seek closure and it’s indifferent to happy endings.
Many of her stories are placed on the outskirts of big cities, with marginalized characters dealing with the complications that this implies. That’s why Lucia Berlin’s biography resonates with them: she worked as an emergency nurse, cleaning woman, teacher, switchboard operator, and receptionist in hospitals. She experienced a lot of pain and suffering, both her own and that of others, and that seeps into her writing. She observes everything and exposes what’s ignored with a bitter eye:
“Poor people wait a lot. Welfare, unemployment lines, laundromats, phone booths, emergency rooms, jails, etc.” A Manual for Cleaning Women, page 30.
“Women’s voices always rise two octaves when they talk to cleaning woman or cats.” A Manual for Cleaning Women, page 31.
Nonetheless, she finds a particular beauty on these margins, revealing something extraordinary that can’t be found anywhere else: “Solitude is an Anglo-Saxon concept. In Mexico City, if you’re the only person on a bus and someone gets on they’ll not only come next to you, they will lean against you.” (Fool to Cry, page 221)
Lucia Berlin was a writer ahead of her time, who talked about all the things that society wanted to relegate to the edges. She was brave enough to leave a written record about those voices that were left out of Literature, including hers. She was excluded from the canon because she showed the reverse of the socially accepted reality.
Luckily, she was rediscovered and rescued from oblivion. Now we can enjoy her beautiful tales and electric prose filled with life and color. After all, one of her wishes as a writer came true:
“Yes. For some reason it seems like I’m very modest — because I don’t care about money or fame or New York Times reviews or any of that stuff. But I love the idea that I’ll be read a long time from now. (…) I love the idea of some little girl going into the library one day and discovering one of my books. So in a way I’m really ambitious.” Quote from https://lithub.com/lucia-berlin-writing-advice-and-more-in-this-never-before-published-interview/
