‘A Manual For Cleaning Women’ by Lucia Berlin

A Manual For Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin, 1984

The magic trick:

A narrator who shares open and honestly but also leaves the bigger sadnesses to be more indirectly implied than said

Happy New Year’s Eve to you! Typically on this day, I try to find a story to highlight on the site that is literally set on New Year’s Eve. But I don’t have one this year. I haven’t read one. So I’m stretching the connection a bit this time and sharing two Lucia Berlin stories – one today and one tomorrow as we kick off 2026.

The reason? Well, first of all, you don’t need an excuse to share two Lucia Berlin stories. They’re so good. But as for the new year’s timing, I think there is something very specifically Lucia Berlin about the turn of the calendar. All the stories of hers that I’ve read seem to simultaneously inhabit a beginning and an ending.

Perhaps no story better encapsulates this strange feeling of sad optimism than “A Manual For Cleaning Women.”

Our narrator here is cleaning houses to get by in the aftermath of her husband’s death. Her rye storytelling style feels honest. She seems to be giving us a clear line directly to her heart as she shares what amounts to a behind-the-scenes look at a cleaning woman’s daily grind. The bus trips. The different homes. The different owners and their various quirks.

But even with all that honesty, she rarely at all touches on her grief. We only get brief, more indirect, glimpses of a true sadness. It is very representative of the way life splits into two kinds of sadness – the day-to-day stress of staying alive sitting alongside the less urgent but far more devastating existential depressions. What is more NYE than that?

And that’s quite a trick on Berlin’s part.

The selection:

Today I stole a bottle of Spice Islands sesame seeds. Mrs. Jessel rarely cooks. When she does she makes Sesame Chicken. The recipe is pasted inside the spice cupboard. Another copy is in the stamp and string drawer and another in her address book. Whenever she orders chicken, soy sauce, and sherry she orders another bottle of sesame seeds. She has fifteen bottles of sesame seeds. Fourteen now.

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