Hi friends,
Ali really sold herself short in last week’s introductory blurb. In addition to being an avid, intelligent reader, she majored in journalism, studied economics, and graduated from college at age twenty. Impressive, I’d say…
This week, my letter to Ali is written while packing in Connecticut. We move west on Thursday.
Dear Ali,
Lucia Berlin is setting me free. There’s so much life in her collection of stories, A Manual for Cleaning Women. It’s perfect for these still summer days.
Berlin’s stories take me places, like stories could as a kid. El Paso, Chile, New York, San Francisco, Mexico. The spicy smells of the desert. Deep-sea divers. “Smoke and chili and beer. Carnations and candles and kerosene.” Buses lumbering up steep roads, and blackberry vines in Berkeley. Lovers on a Texas sun porch, the flash of a cardinal outside in the rain. Snowy Manhattan, streetlights casting shadows.
The collection keeps returning to the same character. She’s born in Alaska, and spends early years in Western mining towns. She has an abusive mother, abusive grandparents, is educated by nuns in Catholic schools. Then, she’s a teenage girl in Chile, living as a socialite. Back in America, she marries and divorces jazz musicians. She works different kinds of jobs (cleaning houses, managing a doctor’s office) to support four little sons. She’s a mother, pouring orange juice and waiting at the laundromat. An alcoholic, in and out of rehab. A caregiver, tending to a sister with cancer in Mexico City.
These are characters in Berlin’s stories. The teenager, the mother, the lover. But they all sound an awful lot like her, from the jobs she worked to the family she had, the places she lived, her crippling addiction.
Only near the end of her life was Berlin sober, stable, and teaching writing. She died at sixty-eight. (A Manual for Cleaning Women was published in 2015, after her death.)
I found myself wondering as I read. Is this character Lucia? Is this one? I hope the collection’s most difficult stories were entirely imagined. There’s one about a conflicted woman who goes to get an abortion, but backs out at the last minute. And one about a girl at a fancy dinner who gets touched beneath the table. A drunk dentist grandfather convinces his granddaughter to pull out his teeth. There’s blood everywhere; she stems the flow with tea bags. (That one will stick with me for a while.) A mother mixes lemon extract with her tea because she’s out of liquor. Did Lucia live all this pain? It seems like she must have. At least some of it.
The whole collection poses some questions. Is material drawn so closely from life creative? Or just an easy way out? Is it self-centered, to give your life to your characters? To reuse it again and again?
I can see how it could be. But when Berlin draws on her life for material it isn’t a weakness—it’s a strength. Her telling of different stories about the same place or the same people doesn’t mean she has less range, just that she has more emotional depth. She was so observant, watching patients at the clinic, the clients she cleaned homes for, other addicts, and passengers on the bus. Sussing out their sufferings, recognizing their loves. She was so unafraid: of facing trauma, others’ and her own, and writing it down instead of trying to forget it. Why would she need to make up things when she had so much material in front of her?
Here’s a quote from the book’s Foreword, written by the writer Lydia Davis.
[Berlin] said that the story had to be real—whatever that meant for her. I think it meant not contrived, not incidental or gratuitous; it had to be deeply felt, emotionally important. She told a student of hers that the story he had written was too clever—don’t try to be clever, she said.
So, here’s my hope: being a writer doesn’t mean giving up all of your routines, or needs, or troubles. It simply means paying attention, and transcribing where that attention leads.
In the collection’s last story, “Homing,” a woman sits on her porch with her oxygen tank, watching the sun glow on Colorado mountains, turning them “stained-glass pink and neon coral.” She’s alone. To write your life beautifully, to observe it exquisitely, doesn’t mean you have no regrets. In fact, noticing things as they really are can make you pretty sad.
What if I had spoken with Paul before he left? What if I had asked for help? What if I had married H?... the answers to each “what if” are strangely reassuring. They could not have happened, this what if, that what if. Everything good or bad that has occurred in my life has been predictable and inevitable, especially the choices and actions that have made sure I am now utterly alone…. My life would have ended up exactly as it has now, under the limestone rocks of the Dakota Ridge, with crows.
But you aren’t alone! Here we are, your readers. Or at least, here’s one. Maybe there’s another, in you, Ali. (If I’ve been convincing enough.) We know Lucia now, at least a little. What she suffered, what she noticed, how hard she worked. How brave she was.
An inspiration
Some other good things I encountered this week:
I’ve been listening to lots of podcasts while wrapping dishes in bubble wrap, including This American Life’s update of their episode on Hong Kong, “Umbrellas Down.” It’s fascinating and frightening.
You mentioned Toni Morrison in your letter last week. This week The Paris Review unlocked an interview with her. I especially love this quote:
My feelings are the result of prejudices and convictions like everybody else’s. But I am interested in the complexity, the vulnerability of an idea. It is not “this is what I believe,” because that would not be a book, just a tract. A book is “this may be what I believe, but suppose I am wrong…what could it be?” Or, “I don’t know what it is, but I am interested in finding out what it might mean to me, as well as to other people.”
Until we can hear The Chicks live in concert, might I recommend The Secret Sisters? They’ve got a soulful sound you’ll love. Start with “He’s Fine.” And then “Carry Me.”
Talk soon,
Kate