The Manual for Cleaning Women is different from Evening in Paradise - another of her story collection I read recently. Unlike as in Evening in Paradise, the stories in this collection are not chronologically arranged. One wouldn’t think that they all relate to one person. One would think it an interesting collection of characters, places and viewpoints. If I had picked up the book without any context, would have read it differently. But now that I know the context, and I know it is all Lucia, and her difficult, difficult life which she opens up for us without a single note of complaint. (And that is the really impressive bit. The reason the writing appeals so much is one can perhaps wonder at the life, but the one who lived it, did not use her whimper or whine or complaint. It is all so full of life, and the spirit to deal with the anything and everything.)
Welcome Home is a memoir, incomplete, peppered throughout with pictures of her, her family and all the different places she lived in. She did not complete it. It leaves off when her kids were still very young and Buddy Berlin was still around. You see glimpses of her stories in that writing. Or perhaps it is truer the other way round. You see glimpses of those houses in the stories.
You don't know her, but after reading these stories you know enough of the themes that have stayed with her through her life. The things that work their way in fiction again and again.
Similar to what Doris Lessing does. Or what Gabriel Garcia does in Living to Tell the Tale. When authors draw so heavily from their lives, you read their memoirs or their books and you jeep getting echoes or déjà vu.
Then there is another list, of all the problems with different houses. Reads like poetry. Sheer number of houses she lived in. Makes you wonder about yourself. And makes you want to do that exercise for yourself.
Apart from the emotion on no complaints, the other emotion was wonder and a creeping desire to judge (the desire to judge manifested after the letters. The stories had left me with awe and wonder). It is such an off-centre life. And lives are products of choices. At times things happen where people don't have control. But at times things happen because people have a choice and they make certain choices. And then when you see other's choices, you start wondering - and unless you stop yourself, one can get to judging too. But one needs to stop. There is no right and wrong. Just choices. And one can almost identify with her at times even if most of the times she stays enigmatic, alien.
By the time you read the three books, you know her well, or so you think. And you get it. And you feel sad. It is a slippery slope.
"Once when I was very little in the Grand Canyon there was a waitress with a huge tray of coffee in cups walking across the restaurant. One of the cups fell and smashed on the floor and she sort of looked up at heaven and said oh hell and tossed the whole tray onto the floor and split. That is what I do all the time."