You can leave it on the bus, in the crack.”īerlin moved around a lot. Living in New York city in 1959, Berlin wrote to Dorn that “the wariness is only thing that bugs me – count your change – everyone does that in every way It’s so much more (positive) to accept or reject all the way, even if you’re wrong.” In A Manual, the cleaning women are given advice that captures Berlin’s own elegance and exuberance: “Take everything that your lady gives you and say Thank you. Today I stole a bottle of Spice Islands sesame seeds.” Her cleaning woman, for instance, goes on to explain that there is indeed theft just not of what we would expect: “All I really steal is sleeping pills, saving up for a rainy day. My solution to this is to always add a few pennies, even a dime.Īs a writer, you could say that Berlin goes around adding pennies and dimes to our readerly ashtrays.ĭespite this spirit of generosity, she is a long way from having anything like a pollyannaish literary disposition. Some lady at a bridge party somewhere started the rumor that to test the honesty of a cleaning woman you leave little rosebud ashtrays around with loose change in them, here and there. We don’t want the change in the little ashtrays.

Not the things people we work for are so nervous about. In the title story of A Manual, the narrator explains:Ĭleaning women do steal. This moral interpretation of the work of selling her writing is of a peculiar yet utterly characteristic bent. Publishers today know what they are doing when they paper Berlin’s stories with these radiant portraits, photographs taken by her former husband, the jazz musician and entrepreneur Buddy Berlin.ĭuring the aforementioned 1960 literary negotiations, Berlin herself was so miserable with the “mercantile ring” of her contract, in particular the fact of being paid for a novel she had not yet written, that she ended up calling it off, explaining that “Nothing ever has hit me quite so hard, morally.” In a 1960 letter to the poet Edward Dorn, Berlin relays the advice of her agent during painful literary negotiations: “Forget it, sign-put your face on the book jacket and you’ll sell a million copies.” In 2018, Picador published Welcome Home, a “portrait” of Berlin comprised of letters, photos and memoir fragments. Her lipstick and earrings are picked up and highlighted by the rose and cerulean of the title font. On the cover of my copy, Berlin’s portrait is almost offputtingly stylish. We’re comparing covers of our editions of the 2015 posthumous collection of Lucia Berlin’s short stories, A Manual for Cleaning Women.

I’m Whatsapping my friend Ulises in Oakland. “Yours looks like an ad for American Apparel.”

Evening in paradise lucia berlin