She rose to sudden literary fame in 2015, eleven years after her death, with the publication of a volume of her selected stories, A Manual for Cleaning Women.
The family lived in mining camps in Idaho, Montana, Arizona, El Paso, Texas and Chile, where Lucia spent most of her youth.
[5] Berlin began publishing relatively late in life, under the encouragement and sometimes tutelage of poet Ed Dorn.
[citation needed] Her one-page story "My Jockey", consisting of five paragraphs, won the Jack London Short Prize for 1985.
[16] Throughout her life, Berlin earned a living through a series of working class jobs, reflected in story titles like "A Manual for Cleaning Women," "Emergency Room Notebook, 1977," and "Private Branch Exchange" (referring to telephone switchboards and their operators).
Up through the early 1990s, Berlin taught creative writing in a number of venues, including the San Francisco County Jail and the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University.
—August Kleinzahler, London Review of Books, on Where I Live Now "In the field of short fiction, Lucia Berlin is one of America's best kept secrets.
Well, not quite… [It is] characteristic of all Berlin's stories, a buoyancy: however grim and 'unworthy' her characters, she enters and explores their lives with unfailing high spirits.... A drug rehab center in New Mexico; a story called 'Electric Car, El Paso' ('It was very tall and short, like a car in a cartoon that had run into a wall.
I don't mean the hard things, like love, but the awkward ones, like how funerals are fun sometimes....' In more ways than one, this book is Lucia Berlin."
—Paul Metcalf, Conjunctions: 14, on Safe & Sound "This remarkable collection occasionally put me in mind of Annie Proulx's Accordion Crimes, with its sweep of American origins and places.
Berlin is our Scheherazade, continually surprising her readers with a startling variety of voices, vividly drawn characters, and settings alive with sight and sound."
[4] As her health and finances deteriorated, Berlin moved into a trailer park on the edge of Boulder, and later, a converted garage behind her son's house outside Los Angeles.
[4] The move allowed her to be closer to her sons, and made breathing easier (Boulder's elevation had exacerbated her lung problems).