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    Welcome Home: A Memoir with Selected Photographs and Letters
    Welcome Home: A Memoir with Selected Photographs and Letters
    Welcome Home: A Memoir with Selected Photographs and Letters
    Ebook202 pages2 hours

    Welcome Home: A Memoir with Selected Photographs and Letters

    By Lucia Berlin

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    "As the case with her fiction, Berlin's pieces here are as faceted as the brightest diamond." --Kristin Iversen, NYLON

    NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE.     Named a Fall Read by Buzzfeed, Vulture, Newsday and HuffPost

    A compilation of sketches, photographs, and letters, Welcome Home is an essential nonfiction companion to the stories by Lucia Berlin

    Before Lucia Berlin died, she was working on a book of previously unpublished autobiographical sketches called Welcome Home. The work consisted of more than twenty chapters that started in 1936 in Alaska and ended (prematurely) in 1966 in southern Mexico. In our publication of Welcome Home, her son Jeff Berlin is filling in the gaps with photos and letters from her eventful, romantic, and tragic life.

    From Alaska to Argentina, Kentucky to Mexico, New York City to Chile, Berlin’s world was wide. And the writing here is, as we’ve come to expect, dazzling. She describes the places she lived and the people she knew with all the style and wit and heart and humor that readers fell in love with in her stories. Combined with letters from and photos of friends and lovers, Welcome Home is an essential nonfiction companion to A Manual for Cleaning Women and Evening in Paradise.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateNov 6, 2018
    ISBN9780374718329
    Welcome Home: A Memoir with Selected Photographs and Letters
    Author

    Lucia Berlin

    Lucia Berlin (1936-2004) worked brilliantly but sporadically throughout the 1960s, '70s and '80s. Her stories are culled from her early childhood in various Western mining towns; her glamorous teenage years in Santiago, Chile; three failed marriages; a lifelong problem with alcoholism; her years spent in Berkeley, New Mexico, and Mexico City; and the various jobs she later held to support her writing and her four sons, including as a high-school teacher, a switchboard operator, a physician's assistant, and a cleaning woman. She published several short story collections including Angels Laundromat and Homesick, and several of her previously published stories are collected together in New York Times Bestseller, A Manual For Cleaning Women.

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    Reviews for Welcome Home

    4/5

    18 ratings3 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Nicely done with a combination of photographs, family memories, and writing taken from the author's work. Inspirational from the sense that I could see doing something similar for a family member or family history.
    • 5/5
      The perfect accompaniment while I re-read A Manual for Cleaning Women! Really enjoyed all the beautiful photographs included.
    • 3/5
      Ultimately, I found this book a bit disappointing--much as I love Lucia Berlin's fiction, this consists more of Berlin's letters to the Dorns than memoir. The memoir is 65 pages with lots of photos, while the letters take up 74 pages, and the letters just don't have the same richness or interest as Berlin's other writing.

    Book preview

    Welcome Home - Lucia Berlin

    Welcome Home

    Alaska, 1935

    Juneau, Alaska, 1935

    Ted and Mary Brown, Juneau, 1935

    The Browns’ house in Juneau

    Lucia, born November 12, 1936

    Juneau, Alaska

    They said it was a sweet small house with many windows and sturdy woodstoves, screens taut against mosquitoes. It looked out on the bay, onto sunsets and stars and dazzling Northern Lights. My mother would rock me as she gazed down at the harbor, which was always crowded with fishing boats and tugs, American and Russian ore ships. My crib was in the bedroom, where it was either very dark or very bright all the time, she told me, without further explaining the long and short lengths of the seasons. The first word I spoke was light.

    Mary Brown and Lucia, Juneau, 1937

    Ted and Mary Brown, Mullan, Idaho, 1937

    Mullan, Idaho

    My earliest memory is of pine branches brushing against a windowpane. This house was in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, at the Sunshine Mine. Massive oak trees had branches almost parallel to the ground and squirrels raced back and forth on them as if on highways.

    I recently read that the scent of flowers, especially roses and lilacs, actually was much more intense years ago, their perfume now diluted by hybridization. True or not, my remembered Idaho perfumes are more vivid than any flower today. The apple blossoms and hyacinths were literally intoxicating. I’d lie on the grass beneath the lilac tree and breathe until I became giddy. In those days I also would spin around and around until I was so dizzy I couldn’t stand up. Maybe these were early warning signs and lilacs my first addiction.

    The Browns’ house in Mullan, 1937

    Lucia, Mullan

    I had never heard about pussy willows, so I was astonished to see fur growing on a stalk. I waded the icy stream to reach them, soaking my shoes and clothes. I wasn’t allowed to go outside after that; I might have drowned or been swept away.

    I slept on a Murphy bed. These were common then, beds that closed up inside a closet during the day. There were no rugs and very little furniture in this big house. Creaks. Echoes of wind in the trees, the splatter of rain against glass. Sobs in the bathroom.

    At night sometimes my parents played pinochle with neighbors. Laughter and smoke floated up the stairs to my room. Finnish and Swedish exclamations. Lovely, the cascade of poker chips and maraca ice cubes. The particular way my mother dealt. Quick hiss of a shuffle, a crisp slap slap slap as she laid down the cards.

    I watched the children go to school every morning and later I could hear them playing kickball and jacks, spinning tops. I played inside with Skippy, my dog, a small coffee percolator tied to a bathrobe belt. My mother read mysteries. We both looked out of windows and watched it rain. At first it is scary, then beautiful, when you wake up to the day of the first snow.

    My father came home from work tired and thick with grime, his eyes startled rings of white with emerald green inside.

    On Saturday evenings we walked down the hill to town. A general store and post office, jail and barbershop, a drugstore and three bars. We got a Saturday Evening Post and a giant-size Hershey bar. Sensible crunch of snow beneath our galoshes. We started home after dark, but it was as bright as day, with Idaho stars shattering the sky. The light of stars was definitely brighter then, too.

    Marion, Kentucky

    Snow and cold that quickly turned into a sultry southern spring with catalpa, peach, and apple blossoms. Birds everywhere, irrepressibly jubilant. Butterflies. I had to stay on the boardinghouse veranda, which was painted glossy black and mopped by glossy nigras. Don’t let her call them that, my father said to my mother.

    I’m from Texas. Should I say darkies?

    Colored, for God’s sake.

    The colored maids and cooks and waiters all talked to me.

    There were no other children at the boardinghouse. The miners in Marion were single men, Mexicans, mostly, hundreds of them living in barracks. The people in the boardinghouse were engineers like my father, assayers, geologists, a bricklayer with a mustache who laughed with my mother on the veranda. The only other woman guest was a health nurse. Her breasts were so enormous she had to eat sitting sideways. I couldn’t stop looking at them until my father spanked me for staring at her bosom. Then just the word bosom gave me the giggles but I couldn’t stop saying it, singing, Bosom bosom bosom. The nurse traveled to different schools, treating impetigo and ringworm with Gentian Violet.

    We lived in one hot room with a ceiling fan and a mosquito net, a balcony big enough only for me. All the guests used a mildewed and foul-smelling bathroom down the hall. Sometimes I came into our room and my mother was crying, but she said, No, I’m not, you hear? She read mysteries lying on the bed in a peach-colored slip.

    Lucia, Marion, Kentucky, 1939

    The boardinghouse, Marion, 1939

    We only went out from the boardinghouse three times. Once the bricklayer took us for a drive into the country. Rolling green hills with cows and horses and then a farm with pigs. Enormous pigs as big as cars with mean little human eyes. My father drove us across the Mississippi River. He cried, looking across the expanse of it, and said we were blessed to live in America. My mother called him a sentimental sap. He took us to a big city where we rode on an escalator. I got jacks to play with on the veranda but couldn’t learn how. I tried to rename Skippy Gentian Violet but it didn’t take. Fireflies. Fireflies.

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