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Lucia Berlin – A Life

“The first word I spoke was Light” – Lucia Berlin, Welcome Home.

By Drew JaehnigPublished 3 years ago 4 min read
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Lucia Berlin

“The first word I spoke was Light” – Lucia Berlin, Welcome Home.

Welcome Home by Lucia Berlin will stun you with its optimism and simplicity. The unfinished work by the deceased author is an autobiographical work that sparkles with buoyancy even in the face of hardship, and you’ll be warmed by the sentiment behind it. Consisting of the original unfinished work as well as photographs and letters compiled by her son, Jeff, the work is a fitting capstone tribute to this fascinating short story writer.

Lucia Berlin published 77 short stories in her lifetime, mostly in magazines and journals such as The Atlantic and Saul Bellow’s The Noble Savage. Berlin, at various points in her life, gathered these stories into six different collections, these versions have gone out of publication. However, we are fortunate that late in her life the stories were recompiled with a few new stories into 3 volumes by Black Sparrow Books, Homesick: New and Selected Stories (1990), So Long: Stories 1987-92 (1993) and Where I Live Now: Stories 1993-98 (1999). Homesick won Berlin an American Book Award, a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and notably contains The Jockey, a one-page masterpiece, which won the Jack London Short Prize of 1985.

Even with the accolades and a growing following, Berlin’s literary carer would remain in obscurity until the posthumous publishing of A Manual for Cleaning Women: Short Stories in 2015. It debuted at #18 on the New York Times Bestseller list, eventually making it as high as #15. It appeared that the world was finally ready to take notice of Lucia Berlin.

Much of her work was informed by her travels, life experience, and struggles. Lucia Berlin was born in Juneau, Alaska, on Nov 12, 1936, to a mining engineer and an alcoholic mother. Her early life was punctuated by frequent moves with her father’s mining career. Taking the family from mine to mine across Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Arizona, and Chile. Establishing early in her life a wanderlust that carried through her later life.

Indeed it is that same wanderlust that is documented in Welcome Home. From the start of the work, you can feel the uniqueness of the writing and know that you are in for a literary treat. Her descriptions are stark, understated, and beautiful. Such as a morning in Mullan, Idaho, as the family started their potbelly stove.

Lucia Berlin 1958

“In a few minutes would come the snap and crack of wood starting to burn, the tumble of a shovelful of coal. Cheerful sound of the percolator, the flick of a match on my mother’s thumbnail, chunk of my father’s Zippo.”

Evocative and straightforward, you feel you are in the moment, you can smell the wood burning and the coffee brewing. The imagery was bringing an almost unexplainable joy.

Her childhood, though, was full of trials and experiences that can be seen in her other works. Her memoir and letters almost serve as an index to her short stories. Characters that appear multiple times in different stories having their roots in Lucia’s earlier life. The mountain man who papered his walls with magazine pages all out of order to keep himself occupied throughout the harsh Montana winter appears here as an origin story.

Lucia’s life and stories all had their roots here somewhere from her sexual abuse by her grandfather, her mother’s depression and alcoholism, her own battle with addiction, and the dependencies that her husbands developed on heroin and other substances. She had four husbands before she was 30, vowing never to marry again after the last. Berlin simply crammed more living into her first 30 years than many of us do in a lifetime, and despite the hardships, there is joy and reckless optimism.

Welcome Home is comprised of the original uncompleted work by Lucia Berlin and includes letters spanning most of her life to complete the history. The contrast between the letters and the work is most noticeable in that the letters are raw, and as such often, her frustration is more visible than in the optimistic bent of her formal writing. Included in the volume are many pictures that bring Lucia to life even more. The overall effect is that you feel as if you really know the woman, she becomes a troubled, talented close friend.

I really recommend this book for Lucia Berlin fans; if you're not a fan yet, try starting with Homesick before you venture into Welcome Home. It somehow makes better sense that way.

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