Overview
The first biography of Lucia Berlin, which takes the form of a literary detective story, tracking the beloved short-story writer from American mining towns to Chilean high society and the beaches of Mexico.
The great American short-story writer Lucia Berlin was born in Juneau, Alaska, in 1936 and died in Santa Monica, California, in 2004. In between she lived in Idaho, Montana, Arizona, Chile, New Mexico, New York City, Acapulco, and Chicago and on the beaches of Mexico and Northern and Southern California. “I’ve lived so many places it’s ridiculous,” she once said, “and because I moved so much, place is very, very important to me. I’m always looking . . . looking for home."
In Looking for Lucia, Nina Ellis travels in search of Lucia Berlin, tracking her from place to place, walking in her footsteps, and interviewing friends and family in order to puzzle out a life that had many twists and turns, highs and lows, stops and starts—a life with such a varied and fascinating cast of characters that it would barely be believable if it weren’t absolutely true.
Narrating her own wild journey across North and South America as well as the life of her subject, Ellis takes us through Berlin's difficult, peripatetic childhood as the daughter of a mining engineer; her formal education in Chile and New Mexico; her informal education in Black Mountain School poetics; and her lifelong search for an artistic community. Berlin married and divorced three times, raised four sons, and held a variety of jobs from house cleaner to medical receptionist. Throughout it all she wrote, consistently and with a farsighted sense of the importance of her work.
This is the first biography of the remarkable Lucia Berlin, but it is also the story of L.B., Lu, Lou, Laura, and the many other versions of herself that she wrote into her stories. It is also a love story: about the biographer’s attachment to her subject, about the seductions of storytelling, and about the way that fact can be inseparable from fiction.
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