Vanity Fair: Lucia Berlin Is Finally a Bestselling Author.
Eleven years after her death, Lucia Berlin become an overnight literary sensation.
It's been quite the whirlwind this month. Three gushing New York Times pieces in four days, then a smaller entry when she hit their bestseller list, and a fifth on the website, calling her a long-lost genius. All in two weeks, that also brought rave reviews from every imaginable quarter, from the New Yorker to Entertainment Weekly and Paris Review.
Lucia Berlin sold more copies of her bold, gritty story collection A Manual For Cleaning Women in the first week or two of September than all the books in her entire life.
Lucia never felt the excitement of a royalty check. She died destitute. Her three surviving sons will receive the first royalty from Farrar Straus and Giroux next spring. They earned it. They lived most of these stories. They are very funny, but not pretty, and 98 percent of it is true. Often, she didn't even change the names.
This Vanity Fair piece captures what she meant to bestselling Columbine author Dave Cullen: Lucia Berlin Is Finally a Bestselling Author.
A taste:
You can also read more on Dave Cullen's blog on Lucia Berlin.
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| Lucia Berlin, Albuquerque, 1956 Buddy Berlin/Literary Estate of Lucia Berlin |
It's been quite the whirlwind this month. Three gushing New York Times pieces in four days, then a smaller entry when she hit their bestseller list, and a fifth on the website, calling her a long-lost genius. All in two weeks, that also brought rave reviews from every imaginable quarter, from the New Yorker to Entertainment Weekly and Paris Review.
 |
| Lucia Berlin feature in New York Times Arts |
Lucia never felt the excitement of a royalty check. She died destitute. Her three surviving sons will receive the first royalty from Farrar Straus and Giroux next spring. They earned it. They lived most of these stories. They are very funny, but not pretty, and 98 percent of it is true. Often, she didn't even change the names.
This Vanity Fair piece captures what she meant to bestselling Columbine author Dave Cullen: Lucia Berlin Is Finally a Bestselling Author.
A taste:
“You better get over your looks before you lose them,” she told me. “Once they’re gone, it will be too late. You’ll never get over it.”
Lucia had been a dazzling beauty, but I knew her as the kindly grandmother out of a children’s fable. She was permanently tethered to an oxygen tank after that hospital stay: wheeling a mobile tank behind her on a little cart, fumbling with the plastic tubing in her nostrils when she got anxious, ripping it out when I truly exasperated her. She would make her point, smile again, and settle it back in.
I was closing in on 40 by then, repeating her mistakes. Sleeping around frantically, to prove someone wanted me. Hot guys, preferably: desired by the desirable. My self-doubt riddled my writing, Lucia said. She cut to the heart of my problems—with men, with friendships, my work. She was brutally honest, yet compassionate, the way she was with her characters.
She instilled candor, but went further in her own work, to audacity. “Cleaning women do steal”—but not what you might expect. Lucia calls female characters fat and hefty and a boy retarded. Because he was. Same page, she describes the victim of a public sex crime as “an ugly, shy little girl.” Because the charismatic boy with the luxurious eyelashes and gold crucifix glittering against his smooth brown chest was vicious enough to pluck the saddest kid to humiliate. The callous brutality of the abuser is revealed.
You can also read more on Dave Cullen's blog on Lucia Berlin.
