Manual for Cleaning Women

Women struggling to pay the rent, dealing with addictions, children, ex-husbands, and miserable jobs. Published posthumously in 2015, the book brings together 43 stories that cut like scalpels. With elegance, precision. Berlin writes with the cynicism of someone who, having already seen rock bottom, laughed instead of crying.

Its protagonists are neither heroines nor victims. They are real women, full of contradictions, tenderness, anger, desire, exhaustion. 

While not a manual on how to clean houses, it is still a manual. About how to live. Unconventional, with fast-paced, soulful prose. Each story is a fragment of reality, told in a voice that makes the everyday epic.

Lucia Berlin (1936–2004) was invisible for decades. A woman, poor, alcoholic, working. And inconveniently brilliant. Her writing, composed in the intervals between low-paying jobs and solitary motherhood, reflects someone who lived as she wrote. She was a telephone operator, nurse, teacher, mother of four children, and one of the greatest short-story writers America has ever produced. 

Manual for Cleaning Women will not confirm your certainties. But you will realize that it is always possible to get through any situation with elegance. Not that everyone can do it. But it is possible.