Anyway, here we are, back at the ranch. Mark and Jeff go to summer school tomorrow and David to play school. It will be a great holiday not to see them all all day for a while, and will get them all adjusted.
Hmm. Well, it’s wonderful you are going to England. Seems like the only civilization left. I wish there were Mexicans there and canoes and cormorants and pelicans. There must be pelicans? Thanks for turning us on to Peace News. Hey, there was an obituary in it for Olga Levertov, who I think is Denise’s sister, a stripper who was very active in peace movements there.
It’s Sunday and we’re sitting around reading the paper—or Buddy is—I still can’t get with it, or TV, or cars, altho telephones are a GAS—our number is 345-0852.
Don’t have the plane anymore or we’d fly up there and see you all. I wish we could somehow, before you go.
Time to go for Sunday drive in the country.
We love you.
Lucia
Notes
Welcome Home
1 This final chapter was unfinished at the time of Lucia’s death.
Selected Letters, 1944–1965
1 Our friend who lives on Horatio (all of us in one room for 2 weeks and it was fine). She is a lovely lady, funny and warm and kind. You would like her.
Acknowledgments
Thank you.
Especially to Barbara Adamson, Jennifer Dunbar Dorn, Katherine Fausset, and Emily Bell.
This book wouldn’t exist without the publication of A Manual for Cleaning Women. Thank you to FSG.
Stephen Emerson, Barry Gifford, and Michael Wolfe, who spearheaded the effort to republish Lucia’s work. Extra thanks and deep appreciation go to Stephen Emerson, whose extraordinary work and care made A Manual for Cleaning Women the great book that it is.
Lydia Davis, for writing the foreword to A Manual for Cleaning Women, the best we’ve ever read.
Jennifer Dunbar Dorn and Gayle Davies.
At FSG: Emily Bell, Flora Esterly, Amber Hoover, Jackson Howard, Devon Mazzone, Naoise McGee, and Stephen Weil.
Friends (old and new): Keith Abbott, Staci Amend, Karen Auvinen, Chansonette Buck, Fred Buck, Stephanie Buck, Tom Clark, Robert Creeley, Dave Cullen, Steve Dickison, Ed Dorn, Maya Dorn, Maria Fasce, Joan Frank, Ruth Franklin, Gloria Frym, Elizabeth Geoghegan, Lorna Gladstone, Sidney Goldfarb, Marvin Granlund, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Anselm Hollo, Laird Hunt, Steve Katz, August Kleinzahler, Erika Krouse, Steven Lavoie, Chip Livingston, Kelly Luce, Jonathan Mack, Elizabeth McCracken, Peter Michelson, Dave Mulholland, Jim Nisbet, Ulrike Ostermeyer, Ron Padgett, Kellie Paluck, Mimi Pond, Joe Safdie, Jenny Shank, Lyndsy Spence, Ivan Suvanjieff, Oscar van Gelderen, David Yoo, and Paula Younger.
The publishers of the previous books: Michael Myers and Holbrook Teter (Zephyrus Image), Eileen and Bob Callahan (Turtle Island), Michael Wolfe (Tombouctou), Alastair Johnston (Poltroon), and John Martin and David Godine (Black Sparrow).
The family: Buddy, Mark, David, Dan, C. J., Nicolas, Truman, Cody, Molly, Monica, Andrea, Patricio, Jill, Jonathan, Josie, Pao, Nacé, Barbara, Paul, Race, Jill Magruder Gatwood, and Oliva Gatwood. Much love.
—Jeff Berlin
Also by Lucia Berlin
Evening in Paradise
A Manual for Cleaning Women
Where I Live Now
So Long
Homesick
Safe & Sound
Phantom Pain
Legacy
Angels Laundromat
A Manual for Cleaning Ladies
A Note About the Author
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 long-term 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. Her first posthumous collection, A Manual for Cleaning Women, was named one of The New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of 2015. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Foreword
Welcome Home
The Trouble with All the Houses I’ve Lived In
Selected Letters, 1944–1965
Notes
Acknowledgments
Also by Lucia Berlin
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
175 Varick Street, New York 10014
Copyright © 2003, 2005 by Lucia Berlin
Copyright © 2016, 2018 by the Literary Estate of Lucia Berlin LP
All rights reserved
First edition, 2018
Most of the chapters from the first section of Welcome Home have previously appeared, in slightly different form, in the journal Square One, Issue No. 1 (Spring 2003) and Issue No. 3 (Spring 2005). The last five chapters were published on newyorker.com as “Memories of Mexico” in 2016.
Unless otherwise noted, all photographs come from Lucia Berlin’s personal photo albums, copyright © 2018 by the Literary Estate of Lucia Berlin LP.
E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-71832-9
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First eBook Edition: September 2018