Lucia Berlin was an American short story writer who died in 2004. Her short stories never reached a mass audience during her lifetime but her group of followers was very devoted. People say that she was a master of the fragment, as her abbreviations propelled her stories forward. Her descriptions of situations and things are very detailed, which instead of causing pauses allows the story to remain in motion. Use of her fragmentation is very distinct in stories like “Strays” and “The Musical Vanity Boxes.”
During her life, Berlin wrote 77 short stories. The majority of the stories she wrote we published in three different volumes: Homesick, Where I Live Now, and So Long. Homesick won an American Book Award. One of Berlin’s first collected stories, A Manual for Cleaning Women, portrayed her use of fragment and showcased her underappreciated talent. Many of her stories were centered around her six-eight years of life. One of Berlin’s close friends, Lydia Davis, wrote that “Berlin’s stories were transformations, not distortions, of the truth.” Berlin would tell exaggerated versions of her life adventures to her son and a lot of the time they would be transformed into the fiction stories she wrote. One of the short stories that she wrote in which its focus is on her life is “Emergency Room Notebook.”
In “Emergency Room Notebook”, the main character in the story, Lucia, works in a California city emergency room. Quite early in the story, it is made clear that death is a regular visitor in the ER and Lucia is fascinated by the body. This fascination is revealed to the reader when Lucia states that she is “fascinated by two fingers in a baggie, a glittering switchblade all the way out of a lean pimp’s back” (Berlin 89-90). Throughout the story, you see how Lucia is annoyed at how much of the staff acts with indifference towards their patients. Lucia’s use of fragmentation and detailed descriptions allow the reader to sympathize with her fight to remain empathetic to her patients.
What makes Lucia Berlin’s stories so special is that she allows the reader to believe in a “real” character. She was able to use autobiography in a way that was flexible enough that the reader was engaged and was able to build sort of a relationship with the protagonist. Berlin was an extraordinary writer, whose talents and stories are underappreciated. Her stories grasp the reader’s attention and encourage them to want to read more.
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