The Resurrection of Lucia Berlin
A fresh collection of stories by former CU English professor Lucia Berlin became a best-seller last year, more than a decade after her death.
The man who lit Lucia Berlin’s firstcigarette happened to be a prince, butBerlin’s life would seem mostly foreignto real-life royalty.
When the fiction writer joined theCU-Boulder faculty in 1994, she hadmade ends meet as a cleaning lady, nurse,switchboard operator and substituteteacher. She’d married and divorced threetimes and raised four sons mostly on herown. She’d subdued alcoholism.
At the time of her death, 10 yearslater, Berlin had also published 76 shortstories and six story collections, severalof them highly regarded. But none soldespecially well, and none of her bestknownworks were in print.
And yet literary celebrity may beupon Lucia Berlin.
Following the 2015 publication of aposthumous story collection, A Manualfor Cleaning Women: Selected Stories (Farrar,Straus and Giroux), Berlin has receivedfull-throated praise from critics. They’vecalled her “an important American writer”and “one of America’s best kept secrets.”They’ve compared her to Raymond Carverand Noble Prize-winner Alice Munro.
Within a week of the book’s debut,it became a New York Times best-seller.Within a month, it had outsold all Berlin’sprevious work combined. The NewYork Times Book Review ultimately namedCleaning Women one of the “10 BestBooks of 2015.”
“Berlin is one of our finest writers andhere she is at the height of her powers,”Molly Giles wrote of Cleaning Women ٳ San Francisco Chronicle.Berlin’s literary career began withpromise: She was first published at age 24in Saul Bellow’s journal, The Noble Savage.Then came the marriages and children, andthe long but successful struggle with drink.Along the way she wrote her stories, whilepiecing together a living from humblerwork. Her first story collection, ԲܲԻdz, appeared in 1981, during a longperiod in Northern California.
Two of her biggest successes came ٳ early 1990s, with the publication ofHomesick (1991) and So Long (1993). dzwon an American Book Award, and in1994 poet Edward Dorn, an old friend whotaught at CU-Boulder, lured her to campusas a writer-in-residence for the Englishdepartment’s creative writing program.
At a time when the program wasknown for “experimental fiction,” Berlinwas notable for writing social realismwith lively characters and a blend ofautobiography and fiction.
Having a colorful life didn’t hurt. Bornin Alaska in 1936, the daughter of a miningengineer, Berlin grew up among workingpeople in a series of mining camps.
She later tasted society life in Santiago,Chile, where her family moved afterWorld War II; it was there that PrinceAly Khan, an international playboy andone-time husband of actress Rita Heyworth,lit her first cigarette, accordingto a life sketch accompanying ԾԲ´dz. She married two Harvardgraduates in sequence and lived amongintellectual bohemians in New Yorkand New Mexico.
But in her writing Berlin embracedthe gritty minutia of everyday life,often the hard life. She dealt withvulnerabilities and vices — restlessness,poverty, scattered friends and family,divorce, addiction. She was familiarwith detox centers, Medicaid clinics,self-destruction.
In all, Berlin was atCU for six years.She’d been hired for her literary talent,but she excelled in the classroom asmuch because of her warm, empatheticand nonjudgmental approach to teaching.
“Lucia had her own style, but shenever tried to create clones of herself,”said Martin Bickman, a CU English professorwho knew her. “She liked to hearstudents’ stories, not what they thoughtthey should write for her class.”
This bred loyalty, said Peter Michelson,an emeritus professor of creativewriting: “She never ended class with ajudgment. Lucia wanted her studentsto keep writing.”
Within two years, Berlin received the university-wide “Excellence in Teaching” awardand was promoted to associate professor.Near the end of her CU career, in 1999, shepublished the third of her best-known storycollections, Where I Live Now.
By then her health was poor, an oxygentank her constant companion. She left theuniversity in 2000 but lingered in Bouldera while, living on Mapleton Hill and in anEast Boulder mobile home park.
When she died in California in 2004,near her sons, it was on Nov. 12, her 68thbirthday — a tidy ending to an untidy lifethat begat stories to remember.