A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

by Lucia Berlin

Other authorsLydia Davis (Foreword), Stephen Emerson (Editor)
Hardcover, 2015

Status

On hold

Publication

Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2015), Hardcover, 432 pages

Description

"Stories from a lost American classic "in the same arena as Alice Munro" (Lydia Davis) "In the field of short fiction, Lucia Berlin is one of America's best kept secrets. That's it. Flat out. No mitigating conditions." --Paul Metcalf A Manual for Cleaning Women compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin. With her trademark blend of humor and melancholy, Berlin crafts miracles from the everyday--uncovering moments of grace in the cafeterias and Laundromats of the American Southwest, in the homes of the Northern California upper classes, and from the perspective of a cleaning woman alone in a hotel dining room in Mexico City. The women of Berlin's stories are lost, but they are also strong, clever, and extraordinarily real. They are hitchhikers, hard workers, bad Christians. With the wit of Lorrie Moore and the grit of Raymond Carver, they navigate a world of jockeys, doctors, and switchboard operators. They laugh, they mourn, they drink. Berlin, a highly influential writer despite having published little in her lifetime, conjures these women from California, Mexico, and beyond. Lovers of the short story will not want to miss this remarkable collection from a master of the form"--… (more)

Media reviews

In “A Manual for Cleaning Women” we witness the emergence of an important American writer, one who was mostly overlooked in her time. Ms. Berlin’s stories make you marvel at the contingencies of our existence. She is the real deal. Her stories swoop low over towns and moods and minds.

User reviews

LibraryThing member msf59
“I love houses, all the things they tell me, so that's one reason. I don't mind working as a cleaning woman. It's just like reading a book.”

Every once in awhile, you stumble on a book, that just reminds you, why books are special, why you have devoted endless minutes, hours and days, to the
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printed page. This amazing collection of stories, that compile the best work of Lucia Berlin, is one such book.

Many of these tales, are based on Berlin's life, gently linked stories, that show women, struggling to make ends meet, working as cleaning women, nurses and switchboard operators. The difficulties of being a single mother, dealing with alcohol and drugs and in the later stories, dreams and mortality.

Obviously what makes all this work, is her writing craft, which makes all this come alive, with humor, intelligence, passion and beauty.

Many readers, are not “short story” fans. Give this one a try: it might just open a door...a very big door.
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LibraryThing member lisapeet
I like her writing so much—a great and significant voice, some really transcendent attention to detail, and I'm glad to see she's getting the attention she deserves, even if it's posthumous. I do wish this collection had been pared down a bit, though—a lot of her work is taken from
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autobiographical sources, and while she lived a hell of a life it's still one life spread out over 40-something stories, and some of the later ones felt repetitious, like they were covering ground that had been mined better earlier in the collection. But still, I'd rather have them all than none, and this is a great body of work. Recommended to all the usual suspects.
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LibraryThing member varwenea
I’ll start this write-up with a suggestion of the order to read this book.
1. Start at the back with “A Note on Lucia Berlin”, which is her life history and hints at the variation in subjects.
2. Read “Silence”, a story about a dark part of her youth, enveloped by an alcoholic mother and
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grandfather. This sets the tone of how she became the person she was, also an alcoholic, before finally stopping in her later years.
3. Read the Forward, where I learned many stories are ‘auto-fiction’, i.e. autobiographical fiction or dramatized self-truth.
4. Read the Introduction, which gives you precise examples of what’s to come.
5. Read the rest of the book.

My review:
I struggled reading this book, putting it down and even back into the bookcase at least four times. But I’m stubborn and eventually got through it.

There are forty-three short stories in this book. 43 in just under 400 pages! For much of it, the stories read like brain puke, as though she has a sudden recollection of a past and hurriedly wrote it down. The sentences are often incompletely. The words can come across as choppy. If she did that purposefully to reflect the randomness of an alcoholic mind, it’s pure genius. If not, it’s crappy writing, and it was a pain to follow these stories which are presented not in chronological order, not separated by location, not grouped by relation (especially her sister Sally who appeared in multiple stories), and not by the same ‘I’. The ‘I’ is not always Lucia. Sometimes it switches to a ‘he’ (“Let Me See You Smile”). Within the same story, time can hop back and forth (“Fool to Cry”), and the ‘I’ can change person (“Mijito”) all without any indicator. Gawd, I hate her dangling pronouns! This book needs some re-ordering and remove a few stories that are dead weight.

Struggling through all that, there are stories that read as though they came from her soul.
“Silence” is named after a period of her youth where she stopped speaking, including at school. Physical and mental abuse from her mother and sexual abuse from her grandfather filled these dark pages, with brief reprieves from a neighbor friend and Uncle John. Her statement of becoming an alcoholic at the end of this story suggest the events here was an instigator.
“Here It Is Saturday” speaks of a writing class in jail. The story flowed particularly well, and the ending was a jolt, in a sad but good way.
“A Manual for Cleaning Women” is touching and yet aching.
“Angel’s Laundromat” is a sweet story about friendship with an Indian (i.e. Native American). Even then, death is implied.
“Dr. H. A. Moynihan” is likely noted as humorous by reviewers, but I just found it gross with young Lucia helping her grandfather with his dentures.
“502” is one of the few that made me smile where 4 old drunks got some free money.

Moments of humor punctuate many of these stories, but overall, to me anywhere, I found the sadness outweighed the humor via alcoholism, racism, death, grief, child abuse, cancer, helpless mothers, harms of gossip, and much more. This is not a book I would readily recommend.
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LibraryThing member EBT1002
This is a charming and engaging collection of stories by Lucia Berlin who must have lived an amazing life. She clearly draws heavily from her own life for her stories, developing characters, communities, and scenery in such vivid and rich detail that the reader is transported. The same characters,
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communities, and scenery show up again and again but each time presents a slightly different perspective or moment in time. And, of course, the themes are persistent: family, love, loss, addiction, and the persistent progress of time with all its "what if"s.

I can see why, in the Forward, Lydia Davis kept quoting little nuggets from the stories. They are full of these perfect simple statements. Here is a favorite:

"Were we a nice family? I didn't know. What I still do is look in picture windows where families are sitting around and wonder what they do, how do they talk to one another?"

And, from "Homing," the final story:

"I have never seen the crows leave the tree in the morning but every evening about a half an hour before dark, they start flying in from all over town. There may be regular herders who swoop around in the sky for blocks calling for the others to come home, or perhaps each one circles around gathering stragglers before it pops into the tree. I've watched enough, you'd think I could tell by now. But I only see crows, dozens of crows, flying in from every direction from far away and five or six circling like over O'Hare, calling calling, and then in a split second suddenly it is silent and no crows are to be seen. The tree looks like an ordinary maple tree. No way you'd know there were so many birds in there."

Who hasn't witnessed this very phenomenon? And Berlin describes it so perfectly, with amusement and wonder and absolute accuracy.

I had many favorite stories among the collection but here is an example of the vast territory of Berlin's writing. Near the end of the collection, "Mijito" broke my heart in a way only the best literature can; I ached as I finished that story. The very next story, "502," was funny and delightful and charming; it left me cheering for its ragtag collection of characters (despite its ominous last sentence).

Highly recommended.
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LibraryThing member clifforddham
Heard about on radio, an East Bay resident, alcoholic, manual labor work, rose to professor at UC Boulder. Amazingly terse, insightful, and expressive short stories. Much local reference.

Amazon: ""I have always had faith that the best writers will rise to the top, like cream, sooner or later, and
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will become exactly as well-known as they should be-their work talked about, quoted, taught, performed, filmed, set to music, anthologized. Perhaps, with the present collection, Lucia Berlin will begin to gain the attention she deserves." -Lydia Davis

A MANUAL FOR CLEANING WOMEN compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin. With the grit of Raymond Carver, the humor of Grace Paley, and a blend of wit and melancholy all her own, Berlin crafts miracles from the everyday, uncovering moments of grace in the Laundromats and halfway houses of the American Southwest, in the homes of the Bay Area upper class, among switchboard operators and struggling mothers, hitchhikers and bad Christians.

Readers will revel in this remarkable collection from a master of the form and wonder how they'd ever overlooked her in the first place."
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LibraryThing member dickmanikowski
I had never heard of writer Lucia Berlin until I happened upon an NPR review of this collection of her stories. And they are absolutely great. As I read through them, though, I noticed some recurring themes. It was almost as though specific characters had reappeared in multiple stories. When I read
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the brief biography of her, all the pieces fit together.
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LibraryThing member ParadisePorch
Probably would be fine for me if it had been another time.
LibraryThing member RandyMetcalfe
The forty-three stories in this collection are both a vibrant demonstration of Berlin’s excellence with the from-life short story and, to some degree, the narrowness of her range. Certainly the best of these stories are up there with the highest examples of the artform during the latter half of
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the 20th century. Some are so poignant and painfully raw as to be almost embarrassing to read. A few are just so sad. Berlin suffered early physical trauma, childhood sexual abuse, emotional shrivelling due to rampant alcoholism in her family especially her mother, and constant uprootedness as the family followed the father’s job placements at mines in the American southwest, in Chile, and elsewhere. Perhaps it is no surprise that Berlin herself turned to alcohol and had to battle with its charms and bedevilment for much of her life. She was as sexually adventurous as the female protagonists in her stories, but she also raised four boys, took on numerous service-related jobs to make ends meet, and, as this collection shows, also managed to write and publish dozens of fascinating and skillful stories.

One thing that surprised me here was not the vivid content of the stories or their frank presentations of alcoholism or sexual wandering. Rather it was the near absence of the act of writing, the process, the hours and hours that Berlin, as a real person, must have spent developing and honing her craft. That must have been a major component in her life and yet here it is nearly invisible. For someone touted as a great realist writer who famously draws on her own experience and presents it seemingly unfiltered, this seems curious. I can only assume it is deliberate artistic choice. (Because I doubt she found writing to be more shameful than some of the things she did under the malign influence of alcohol.) My question is what does that choice reveal?

I’m glad I read this collection and got a chance encounter some of Berlin’s writing. I just don’t think I’ll confuse that with having met her. I think there is more here than what appears on the surface. Which is probably no surprise.

Recommended.
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LibraryThing member alexrichman
A wonderful cross between autobiography and short-story collection. We meet the same women over and over - ciphers for Berlin - in expertly observed stories. Some are meandering, others devastating, but all are crisp and beautiful.
LibraryThing member Citizenjoyce
These stories all ring true. Lucia Berlin lead a challenging life doing lots of different jobs in different places, and she writes her stories from herself. Her characters are nurses, ward clerks, construction workers, teachers, damaged children, catholic school girls, bad mothers and abusive
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fathers. Being an alcoholic herself, alcohol plays a large part in the stories. There's humor, sadness, great tragedy, familiar situations and quick surprises. I've usually found a whole book full of short stories to be too much, but these, wow, I could have just kept reading.
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LibraryThing member Cariola
Way too many stories about alcoholics and people dying of cancer for my taste. I could not finish this one--too depressing.
LibraryThing member Jawbells
WOnderful subjects, characters. Enormous power for such very short stories.
LibraryThing member JGoto
I am not usually a fan of short stories, but Lucia Berlin's prose evokes a raw intimacy that leaves the reader satisfied, even after just a few pages. Highly recommended.
LibraryThing member whitreidtan
When I was in college, I wrote a collection of short stories. They likely weren't very good (and no one read them beyond my advisor, my first reader, and potentially my parents). But they were very much of the write what you know variety and I mined experiences from my own life and from my mother
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and grandmother's lives to come up with the basis for the stories. Lucia Berlin also uses her own life and experiences in creating the sort stories that form this collection. Although hers are chock full of autobiographical elements, as were mine, I cannot claim to have the facility with language or sophistication of craft that she does but I hope that mine have a sliver more hope and happiness in them than hers contain.

This is a collection of 43 stories, all populated with broken characters. Many are clearly half-autobiographical and several are about the same recurring characters. Even those that are not obviously linked in this way are very similar in theme and tone. The stories are raw, dealing with alcoholism, drug addiction, cancer, death, despair, and loneliness. Berlin doesn't write happy. She writes about the disadvantaged, the poor, the overworked, and the floundering. The stories are straightforward and clearly personal. Having so many under one cover highlights the repetition though. They are well written but perhaps a more careful curation would have prevented the fatigue that set in as I pushed further into the book. Short story readers will likely appreciate these as the neglected gems that so many reviewers have labelled them, I just reached a saturation point before I finished (and I did in fact finish).
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LibraryThing member nancyjean19
I loved these stories! Their auto-biographical nature took a little getting used to, but I enjoyed traveling through the Southwest and Mexico with Lucia Berlin once I got on her wavelength. Highly recommended!
LibraryThing member TimBazzett
A MANUAL FOR CLEANING WOMEN is hands down one of the best short story collections I have read in years. It's hard to believe that the author, Lucia Berlin, was virtually unknown during her lifetime. She died fifteen years ago. She'd finally gotten sober after suffering from alcoholism for most of
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her adult life. And yes, she did work as a cleaning woman, even while still drinking, and was writing all the time too. A lot of the stories here are about her life as an alcoholic, and there is a surprising amount of humor in them. Berlin's stories have been compared to Denis Johnson's JESUS' SON stories, and yeah, I can see that, but Johnson's stories never made me laugh like Berlin's do. Her stories have also been called "autofiction," or highly autobiographical, and she has acknowledged that too, although she also admitted mixing fact and fiction quite easily. Married a few times, and the mother of four sons, Berlin was pretty philosophical about it all, noting in her story, "So Long," -

"So what is marriage anyway? I never figured it out. And now it is death i don't understand. My country after Rodney King and the riots. All over the world, rage and despair."

Hmm … Still pretty relevant, huh? And there are several stories here about death, as her narrator sits with her younger sister, who is dying slowly and painfully of cancer, in Mexico City. The sisters become closer, remembering their horrible childhoods, neglected by their alcoholic mother, molested by their grandfather. Their mother, who attempted suicide a couple times, always leaving the narrator notes, one signed Bloody Mary, another said, "No noose … couldn't get the hang of it." See? Very dark humor, perhaps inherited.

There is another hilarious story about Lu's friendship with four old winos who sit in a junked Corvair and drink all day. And how Lu is NOT arrested for DWI, because her car was empty when it hit their junker. Sorry, you have to READ the story. It's funny! And there are heartbreaking stories here too, like the teenage mother illegal immigrant and her baby in "Mijito."

There are a lot of stories here, every one a gem. When FS&G collected all these stories from earlier small press editions, the book became a bestseller and the New York Times picked it as one of the 10 best books of 2015. My hat is off to that book's editor and collaborators. Because I loved this book. My highest recommendation. R.I.P., Lucia. You MATTERED! You were a WRITER!

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER
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LibraryThing member strandbooks
I’ve realized my challenge with short stories. It takes me a few pages to figure out the characters and setting, I start getting into it...and then it’s over. Unless it is a book like The Unaccustomed Earth that I stay up until 3 am to finish, it takes me forever to get through a book of short
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stories because I don’t feel the urge to pick it up after putting it down.
Lucia Berlin’s stories were compiled after her death in the book A Manual for Cleaning Women. They are fictional but autobiographical too. They deal a lot with the places she lived (Idaho, AZ, Chile, TX, CA, CO) and her life’s struggle with alcoholism, her sister’s cancer, her abusive mother and her many stints in blue collar jobs.
I wish the book was about half the length and either organized by topic or place rather than random stories, I.e all the short stories with her sister Sally in one section, her CA stories in another. That may have made it easier for me to want to keep reading.
Although it sounds very depressing, there are some stories and language filled with hope and love and lots of beauty in nature. It was a good book for book club discussion. Plus, with short stories you don’t have to worry about spoilers as much when some people have only read a few stories.
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LibraryThing member NancyJak
A collection of short stories. Some are autobiographical and some appear
to be that but have different character names and some are total fiction. They were fascinating. Someone in a review said to first read “a note on Lucia Berlin”, then read the short story “Silence” and then the rest
Of
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the book. Fascinating stories, fascinating author.
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LibraryThing member Carrie_Etter
For me, reading Lucia Berlin was like coming home, as some of its themes touch on issues in my own life, including shifts between working and middle class experience. I learned a lot about writing fiction, particularly developing characters and letting the character be the story. The book seems to
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consist of memoir, thinly veiled memoir, and a little fiction, which is another interesting element. I'm sure I'll be revisiting this book in the future; I wish the title story were online so I could share it widely.
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LibraryThing member Betsy_Crumley
I just didn't get all the fuss about this book.
LibraryThing member Lady_Lazarus
This kind of irony simply does not appeal to me - or it might well be that I just don't understand it. The problem for me was that I could not feel for the characters and I did not find sympathy from the author for them either. I must say it was incredibly difficult for me to concentrate on the
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stories, although in general I like this kind of seemingly flat stories with quite an abrupt end. Now, in the end of each story, I felt disappointed and empty. Often the characters seemed somehow quite alike, which made me read the collection as a weird kind of novel where the main character changes name and environment for each chapter. I feel that perhaps I should give this book another try, but somehow I doubt it would still be waste of time and energy.
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LibraryThing member addunn3
Very interesting stories.
LibraryThing member moukayedr
I usually do not read short stories collections. I feel that starting out each book is an investment in getting to know its characters, and get involved in their pain. The short stories are sometimes not worth the investment as they conclude too quickly or take too long to get to the point.

This
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collection is different. The stories are worth reading for their individual value. They are vignettes, snapshots of a life lived in struggle, between poverty and affluence, sobriety and alcoholism, sickness and health, life and death. They are breathtaking for their emotional power.
They are also taken from the author's live, so we meet the same characters sometimes at different stages of their lives, from different points of view. It makes for an interesting reading like looking at lives in a mosaic of jigsaw puzzle form.

Lucia Berlin's writing is literary without being pretentious. Here the quirky humor, the inventive imagery and new turns of phrase trump the heavy literary prose that plagues most award-wining writing. She is a literary writer for the people, embracing their problems, their body odor, their embarrassing failings in the face of addiction, sickness, infidelity and death. One can feel her empathy and generosity of spirit throughout her narratives.

This book is sometimes heavy, sometimes funny but always profoundly relevant. It is worth putting on your bookshelf to dive into and re-read repeatedly.
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LibraryThing member steve02476
Perfect stories, what a great writer. I had never heard of Lucia Berlin until my wife gave me this book for Christmas. It's taken me a long time to read this book but that's because I've been sipping it slowly. The author has worked a wondrous variety of personal experiences into stories that have
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tragedy, humor, warmth, and wisdom all mixed in various proportions.
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Language

Original publication date

2015

Physical description

432 p.

ISBN

0374202397 / 9780374202392

Local notes

Fiction
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