At Electric Literature, Kelly Luce discusses the new collection of Lucia Berlin’s stories, A Manual for Cleaning Women, why she loves her fiction, and how the author’s work has often been overlooked until now:
Maybe it’s because she was a woman writing largely about women, from the perspective of women, and also about real sadness—not cute pat-her-on-the-head romantic problems and family matters. The women in her stories work jobs that roughen the hands and tax the knees; they work jobs that cause a lifetime of lower back pain. Who wants to read about that? And, to make matters worse, she was funny.
