What else have I missed? Lucia Berlin asks us to look harder.

I have a neighbor who is addicted to renovation. Not a week goes by without the grrrr of a truck, the song of a carpenter, the buzz of a saw in a tree. I'm renovation shy myself. I do what needs to be done only when it must be done. Only when I force myself to see that yes, the roof is leaking again, or the bathtub crack hasn't put its own sutures in, or, unless I take some action now, I won't have a working oven.

There is a lot that I don't see. There's a lot that I forget after I see it. There are details that go to insta-blur. I remember, for example, a pink dress, a long table and its drying watercolors, Jethro Tull playing through a rickety box, and a bottle of linseed oil stashed where most might stash some food, all of which equals the day I fell for certain in love with my husband.

But what else was there? I could search my memory for a very long time, but if I didn't see the greater details first, if I didn't notice then, I've got nothing now.

This week I read Lucia Berlin's extraordinary collection, A Manual for Cleaning Women. The stories are primarily (we're told) autobiographical, except when Berlin felt the need to exaggerate for effect. Many "memoirists" will exaggerate and call the story a memoir. Thankfully Berlin does not. We read her and know a version of her. We sift our way through the authentics. She makes no claims, except on our imagination.

In the final story in the collection, Berlin's narrator—tethered to an oxygen tank, full of Berlinesque thoughts—looks back over the what if's of her life. She seduces us until we're caught in the snare of her possibilities, then snapped back to her quasi-fictional now. The character watches crows crowd a tree and wonders why she never sees them leave at dawn. She wonders what else she hasn't seen, what else she hasn't done.

Here, early, she worries over details missed. I find this passage extraordinary because I'm not sure I've ever read an author of any genre who has read the world as closely as Berlin must have read the world to write her stories.

And yet: What else?

What else?

It's a question for all of us.

I don't know why I even brought this up. Magpies flash now blue, green against the snow. They have a similar bossy shriek. Of course I could get a book or call somebody and find out about the nesting habits of crows. But what bothers me is that I only accidentally noticed them. What else have I missed? How many times in my life have I been, so to speak, on the back porch, not the front porch? What would have been said to me that I failed to hear? What love might there have been that I didn't feel?

Lucia Berlin, "Homing," A Manual for Cleaning Women

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Lucia Berlin/A Manual for Cleaning Women: Reflections

It's a beautiful object. It's a collection of, to borrow Lydia Davis's reference, auto-fiction. It's the galloping work of Lucia Berlin, who is no longer with us, who is famous now, on all the lists, some ten years since her passing.

What would she make of her fame? What would she do with it?

You read these stories and you think—perhaps they're not stories. Perhaps they are the beads of an abacus—pushed in this direction, pushed in that, always (reliably) adding up to something. These pieces may be insistently compact, but they are never rushed, they are never a detail short, they are never mere asides. They're some of the most intimate interludes I've ever read—parabolically witty and (at the same time) deeply unsettling.

We meet:

A child who helps her grandfather pull all of his teeth. A woman who believes herself to be generous in ways others do not. An alcoholic who cannot help herself. A sister who reconciles with a dying sister. A seductress who shows up in all the stories men tell. A nurse. A cleaning woman. A daughter tending an unwell mother. An unwell mother mothering sons. An unfaithful adventuress.

And then the stories cycle through and some of the same characters with the same names appear again and we already know them, we bring our growing knowledge of this singular storyteller's band of characters to every story that she tells.

Like Colum McCann in Thirteen Ways of Looking, Berlin sometimes dabbles in the meta, comments on the commentary, leaves overt clues regarding how her stories get made.

From "Point of View":

You'll listen to all the compulsive, obsessive boring little details of this woman's, Henrietta's, life only because it is written in the third person. You'll feel, hell if the narrator thinks there is something in this dreary creature worth writing about there must be. I'll read on and see what happens.

Nothing happens, actually. In fact the story isn't even written yet. What I hope to do is, by the use of intricate detail, to make this woman so believable you can't help but feel for her.

At other times, as in her title story, Berlin appears to be rattling off observations about the houses she cleans, but that's not really her point at all. Her point is what happens when the pattering noise of her daily living gets interrupted by the deep abyss of sadness that she feels:

My friends say I am wallowing in self-pity and remorse. Said I don't see anybody anymore. When I smile, my hand goes involuntarily to my mouth.

And you stop. You press your hand to your mouth. You feel her pain.

Berlin creates a familiar terrain, but she doesn't repeat herself. She generates a recognizable voice, but it has energy, it is not dulled by repeated use. I had the feeling, reading these stories, that I got when I read Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation. Something new, I thought. Something bold. Something classic. Berlin is alive on these pages.

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