Welcome home : a memoir with selected photographs and letters

Title:

Author:

Summary:

Before Lucia Berlin died, she was working on a book of previously unpublished autobiographical sketches called Welcome Home.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.

Edition:

First edition.

Physical Description:

ix, 162 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 22 cm

Genre:

Autobiographies.

Personal Subject:

Berlin, Lucia.

Subject Term:

Women authors, American -- Biography.

Publisher:

Farrar, Straus and Giroux,

Publication Date:

2018

ISBN:

9780374287597

Publication Information:

New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018.

Call Number:

928 BERLIN

Holds: Copies:

Available:*

Item Barcode	Collection	Call Number	Status	Item Holds
33607003353938	Adult Nonfiction	928 BERLIN	Searching... Unknown	Searching... Unavailable

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

"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Before Lucia Berlin died, she was working on a book of previously unpublished autobiographical sketches called Welcome Home .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 .

Author Notes

Lucia Berlin (1936-2004) worked brilliantly but sporadically throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Her stories are inspired by 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. Sober and writing steadily by the 1990s, she took a visiting writer's post at the University of Colorado Boulder in 1994 and was soon promoted to associate professor. In 2001, in failing health, she moved to Southern California to be near her sons. She died in 2004 in Marina del Rey.

(Bowker Author Biography)

Reviews (1)

Publisher's Weekly Review

The unique and captivating perspective prized by fans of Berlin (A Manual for Cleaning Women) is on haphazard but still-mesmerizing display in this nonfiction complement to her autobiographical short stories. Readers will recognize many real-life details mined for Berlin's fiction, here rendered in less finished form: the peripatetic childhood in mining towns; high-society high school days in Chile; her successive marriages to jazz musicians and friends Race and Buddy. The volume's first part consists of fragments from a memoir left unfinished at the time of her death in 2004, illustrated with numerous photographs. The second, stronger section presents select letters, many from her time living in New York City from 1959-1961. Although more editorial context would have been helpful, the (too few) missives will fascinate fans with what seems a peek at the unvarnished Berlin, whose self-reflective ("I am still not proud and I am not yet humble") and candid ("We are laughing now, in debt and broke and sickly") voice comes roaring through. For the uninitiated, starting with editor Stephen Emerson's concluding biographical sketch would be a good entrée; even better would be to read Berlin's stories and then return to this work with new appreciation. Agent: Katherine Fausset, Curtis Brown. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.