The short-story writer Lucia Berlin offers masterly, beguiling takes on working-class lives. The author of the collections "Evening in Paradise" and "A Manual for Cleaning Women," among others, Berlin had an ardent following, but didn't achieve widespread literary acclaim until years after her death, in 2004. As a writer, she skillfully oscillates between the catastrophic and the maudlin, tendering offbeat yet clear-eyed observations. In 2016, The New Yorker published "Memories of Mexico," an excerpt from Berlin's final project, a group of autobiographical sketches about her life. In the essay, she writes about her experiences as a young divorced mother of two boys, living with a new boyfriend, Buddy, and travelling across New Mexico and throughout Mexico. As she gets to know Buddy, she discovers that he's a habitual user of heroin. The essay is a poignant reflection on the devastating nature of addiction and its unsettling ability to intrude, like clockwork, on the everyday marvels of life. "Buddy and the boys speared fish, caught lobster, gathered clams," she observes. "We became a part of the village and of the bay and jungle around us. . . . Every morning, when the gulls came, for the next year or so, we would look into each other's eyes, confirming the happiness and gratitude we felt, too fearful to actually say it out loud. And then we stopped that look, and for all I know the gulls stopped coming." Berlin writes about the ways in which significant moments in time palpitate under the burden of addiction and fixation. With spare prose, she presents a family life steeped in wonder yet lacerated by persistent waves of darker compulsions. Imperfection, not sin, is Berlin's subject. Her writing is more than simply sharp and dazzling; it's fierce and uncompromising—delivering a disquieting rumination on human frailty and the unpredictable, vivid ways it continues to move among us, pulsing softly just beneath the skin.
—Erin Overbey, archive editor
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