A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories by Lucia Berlin (2015) The best novel I read so far this year is called “Let Me See You Smile”—but it’s not a novel, it’s a story in this book—but it feels like a novel in its immensity. It is long, so maybe it would technically be a novella—it’s about an older woman in a relationship with a younger guy, and they get into legal trouble, find a lawyer who helps them—who also gets deeply emotionally involved—but there’s no way to begin to touch on the complexity of it. If I was still thinking about movies, this would be the one to attempt to adapt—but on the other hand, maybe I’d be protective of it. Not to take away from the rest of the stories in this immense volume—and it’s probably not even the best one here! But what is best? With stories, shorter fiction, like poetry, you read through them and intensely connect to some and don’t connect at all to others—but that’s really not fair to the others—which you realize, when you come back the book later—it just wasn’t time yet for some of those stories. The writing is so good—often surprising, and often very, very funny—that I could imagine having many favorites over the years. This is a book I definitely want to come back to. Some of these stories are so emotionally devastating that you might have to put up a wall—not let them in, in order to guard yourself from them. But you can still appreciate their power, or off-centered weirdness. A lot of them are about women, and children, and a lot about people who are working-class. Some about people living in poverty. And then there’s alcoholism, and addiction, and every kind of trouble, including illness, and incarceration. It’s a full course of humanity, for sure. I’m not going to list favorites—though I have some—I’m making notes for myself, though, so I can check those out first, when I come back to it, which I will do. I also want to look for other stuff she wrote—this is the first I’ve read by her—even though I’ve known about this book for a while. Just hadn’t gotten to it.

3.10.26