They offer a glimpse into the attempts Berlin made at a so-called “normal life,” despite being drawn to artists, and to her own craft. In addition to those drawn from the landscapes of her childhood, the stories in Evening in Paradise that take place in Albuquerque, New York, and Mexico (where the peripatetic Lucia Berlin, as a young mother, lived at times with her four young boys and three husbands) are especially joyful for him to read. One haunting story follows a teenage American girl sent to a charming, predatory Chilean aristocrat’s estate, invoking shades of Northanger Abbey to illustrate the tension between sexual desire and resignation.įor Jeff Berlin, this second volume is a chance to see his mother explore territory that, if not exactly happier in theme, isn’t centered on the addiction that plagued her in her later years. Berlin spent her teenage years in glittering pre–civil war Santiago, Chile, where her engineer father was relocated. She grew up in mining camps in places like Idaho and Montana before her stint in El Paso, when she and her alcoholic mother moved in with her grandparents during World War II.
She was using it as a way to either explain things to herself or to remember them.”Įvening in Paradise offers a kind of prequel to the protagonists and scenarios that populate A Manual: Delivered in mostly chronological order, starting with a story about a young girl living with her volatile family in El Paso, these narrators are younger, their stories inspired by Lucia Berlin’s early years.
“As kids, it’s like, Is she doing this on purpose that she’ll have something to write about? Is she being the tortured crazy person to write about it?” Jeff Berlin says.
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