Grief, addiction, romance, abuse, neglect, hope, joy, and always, beyond all else, love-these are the stories that Lucia Berlin seeks to tell. What happens to a single character feels both infinitesimally personal, theirs and theirs alone, while at the same time encompasses the experiences of the whole of humankind. Even as she wanders across space, time, and genre, exploring meta-fictive dialogue or first-person, male narrators (a refreshing switch in POV I feel she handled well), the reader remains grounded in the intimacy of connectivity at the center of every story. In these stories, she pushes the boundaries of bio-fictive settings and characters while still searching for the truth of why people are drawn to each other. While the collection is more expansive than Evening in Paradise, her voice is still the one I fell in love with that summer day. A Manual for Cleaning Women, also posthumously published, came out in 2015 and is the short story collection that placed Berlin in a long deserved spotlight. Falling in love seems an apropos response to a writer whose work arises from an almost innocent belief in connectivity, both subconscious and actively pursued, between people. I read it the summer after its release and I fell in love with her narrators, her places, her language, her voice. The first work I read by Lucia Berlin was the 2018 collection Evening in Paradise.
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