The story is the thing

Autofiction — lightly anonymized fiction based on the author’s own life experience — has been very popular lately, with a host of young writers exploring that genre. As a smattering of examples reviewed in this blog, there’s Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain and its followup, Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts, Brandon Taylor’s Real Life, Lee Cole’s Groundskeeping, Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, and Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times, and the layered and powerful sort-of-autofiction Homeland Elegies, by Ayad Akhtar.

Long before all these books were written, there was Lucia Berlin. She was born in 1936, many decades before the writers listed above, and her life provided immense grist for her stories. Her early life was lived on the move, following her father’s mining job — Alaska, Montana, Arizona, and Chile. For a while she lived with her mother’s natal family in El Paso, Texas. Her grandfather and mother were abusive and alcoholic. Her family lived in relative poverty in America, but then in luxury in Chile. She had scoliosis and wore a back brace through much of her life. As an adult, she married three times and had four sons, and lived all over the western half of the United States, working as a cleaner, nurse, and switchboard operator while bringing up her sons. And yet, she found the time to write stories, which brought little fame or money through her lifetime.

A decade after she died, a compendium of her stories was released to wild acclaim, and having just read the book, this acclaim is definitely justified.

Berlin’s stories feature many different protagonists, but after reading through some of them, it becomes obvious that the characters Carlotta or Maggie or Dolores or Lucia are all based on the same person, and the stories reflect Berlin’s own life experiences.

The title story is set in Berkeley, California, and captures the originality of Berlin’s writing.

Cleaning women do steal Not the things the people we work for are so nervous about. It’s the superfluity that finally gets to you. We don’t want the change in little ashtrays.

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. My solution to this is always to add a few pennies, even a dime. [..] All I really steal is sleeping pills, saving up for a rainy day.

The story includes several scattered bits of pithy advice.

(Cleaning women: As a rule, never work for friends. Sooner or later they’ll resent you because you know so much about them. Or else you’ll no longer like them, because you do.)

Berlin was sharply perceptive and observant. In Angel’s Laundromat, she writes about a fellow laundromat user, an Indian (as in Native American, not desi):

His hands that day were on each taut blue thigh. Most of the time they shook badly and he just let them shake in his lap, but that day he was holding them still. The effort to keep them from shaking turned his adobe knuckles white.

In Panteon de Dolores the protagonist is helping her sister who is dying of cancer.

In Mexico there is never not anyone else there. If you go into your room to read somebody will notice you’re by yourself and go keep you company.

Despite the hard physical labour (which must have been even harder for someone with back problems), there is a wry humour through most of the stories. Stars and Saints is about a young girl at a convent school who suffers from scoliosis and is cold-shouldered by her fellow students. She hides in the kitchen during recess, but then finds a role helping the nuns to remove dead mice from traps, until her mother finds out and is mortified.

So that ended that, and it was a big misunderstanding all around. The nuns apparently thought I had been hanging around the kitchen because I was this poor hungry waif, and just gave me the mousetrap job out of charity, not because they really needed me at all. The problem is I still don’t see how the false impression could have been avoided. Perhaps if I had turned down the biscuit?

In Fool to Cry, Carlotta has dinner with a tweed-dressed Englishman she had known years ago.

We walked up and down the street, peering into the windows of one wonderful restaurant after another, but none were quite right, one was too dear. I decided to use the word dear instead of expensive from now on. Oh look, here’s my dear phone bill!

Berlin writes about people she sees on the street, people she meets at work, her lovers and husbands, her sons. In Bluebonnets, Maria is in her fifties, and travelling to Texas to meet a fellow writer she has known through phone and letter.

Her sons, all grown now, could be worse than parents, more judgemental, more old-fashioned when it came to her.

Some of the stories tackle difficult topics:

[..] if Grandpa did to [her mother] what he did to both Sally and me. She never said anything about it, but he must have, since she hated him so much, would never let anybody touch her, not even shake hands…

Are the stories accurate? Well, autofiction is by nature fictionalized, and the degree of fiction varies. One of her sons wrote:

Ma wrote true stories, not necessarily autobiographical, but close enough for horseshoes. Our family stories and memories have been slowly reshaped, embellished and edited to the extent that I’m not sure what really happened all the time. Lucia said this didn’t matter: the story is the thing.

There are a lot of stories in this book, 46 of them to be precise. There is typically no connection between two successive stories, so a reader will need to reset their mental environment at the end of each one. For me, as with all collections of short stories, this gets rather tiring, and so I think this is a book to be owned, with a few stories read and appreciated now and again.

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