Lucia Berlin: 'Conversational, confessional snapshots into domestic life'

Sketching lives very similar to her own, Berlin’s stories of hardscrabble lives resemble Raymond Carver’s – while also invoking some of Proust’s spirit

“It’s not that I’m worried about the future that much”, explains an ageing woman in Lucia Berlin’s story A New Life. “It’s my past that I can’t get rid of, that hits me like a big wave when I least expect it.” The waves of memory crash again and again in Berlin’s work as she, and a variety of narrators who typically share many of the details of her biography, relate episodes that together form a body of work that is part memoir, part auto-fiction, and part single, extended story cycle.

Related: A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin review – an acute talent that deserves to be celebrated

Berlin instinctively recoils from moments that threaten sentimentality

I don’t like Diane Arbus. When I was a kid in Texas there were freak shows and even then I hated the way people would point at the freaks and laugh at them. But I was fascinated too. I loved the man with no arms who typed with his toes. But it wasn’t the no arms that I liked. It was that he really wrote, all day. He was seriously writing something, liking what he was writing.

If Berlin is at her best when exploring character, she is at her weakest when concocting plot

Related: A brief survey of the short story: David Foster Wallace

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