Lucia Berlin - Welcome Home: A Memoir with Selected Photographs and Letters

Welcome Home

A Memoir with Selected Photographs and Letters

Lucia Berlin

Edited and with a Foreword by Jeff Berlin

PICADOR

In memory of Fred Buck and Helene Dorn

Contents

Foreword

Ive lived so many places its ridiculous... and because I moved so much, place is very, very important to me. Im always looking... looking for home.

Lucia Berlin, interview (2003)

The first writer I ever watched at work was my mother, Lucia Berlin. My earliest memories are of my brother Mark and me riding our tricycles around our Greenwich Village loft while Mom pounded away on her Olympia typewriter. We thought she was writing lettersshe wrote a lot of letters. On our long walks around the city, we would stop at a mailbox almost every day, where she would let us drop her envelopes through the slot. We loved to see them disappear and hear them fall. Whenever she received a letter, she would read it to us, often making a story out of whatever had been delivered that day.

We grew up listening to her stories. We heard a lot of them, and sometimes they were our bedtime stories: her adventures with her best friend, Kentshereve; the bear that kept them captive when they were camping; the cabin with the magazine-page wallpaper; Aunt Tiny up on the roof; Uncle Johns pet mountain lionwe heard them all more than once. They were stories from her life and many would find their way into the stories that she later wrote and published.

When I was around six, while exploring a closet, I discovered a typewriter case. Inside was a folder with A Peaceable Kingdom written on the front. It was a story about two little girls selling musical vanity boxes all around El Paso. It was the first thing I ever read that wasnt a childrens book. It was then that I realized my mom wasnt just typing letters, she was writing stories. She explained to me how, a few years before, she had been published in magazines. She showed me copies of them and let me read them. After that, I often pestered her to let me read what she was working on, to which she would say, When Im finished.

It would be another seven or eight years before she started finishing things enough to let me read them. By this time, she had two more sons (my brothers, David and Dan), was divorced from her third husband (our Dad, Buddy Berlin), had moved to Berkeley, and was struggling to make ends meet as a teacher at a small private high school. Amid the chaos (or because of it), she wrote more than ever. Most nights, after dinner and our favorite TV show, she would park herself at the kitchen table with a glass of bourbon and start writing, often continuing late into the night. She usually scribbled longhand with a ballpoint pen into spiral notebooks, though occasionally we would be awakened by the sound of her typewriter, often drowned out by her favorite song of the moment being played over and over on the stereo.

The first stories she finished around this time were ones she had started in New York and Albuquerque in the early sixties. These soon gave way to more personal stories born out of bad situations and personal tragedies, resulting from her worsening problem with alcohol. After losing her teaching job, she took on a series of different jobs (cleaning woman, telephone operator, hospital ward clerk) that would provide rich source material for new stories, as would time spent in drunk tanks and detox wards. Despite any setbacks, she continued to write and soon began to get published again.

Years later, the last thing she had me read was an early draft of Welcome Home, a series of remembrances of the places she had called home. She had originally intended it to be simple sketches of the places themselves, with no characters or dialogue. These were the stories from her childhood that we had heard when we were kids but now in sequence and no longer masquerading as fiction. Unfortunately, time ran out and the last version of the manuscript ends in 1965, the last sentence unfinished.

During her life, Lucia wrote hundreds, if not thousands, of letters. Included here are some of our favorites from the same time frame as Welcome Home. Most of them are letters written to her good friends Ed Dorn and Helene Dorn between 1959 and 1965. It was a time of drama, growth, and upheaval, and the letters offer a fascinating look into the mind of a young mother and aspiring writer in the throes of self-discovery.

We give you Welcome Home; stories, letters, and photographs from the first twenty-nine years in the life of a unique American voice.

Jeff Berlin, May 2018

Welcome Home