Until the publication of Welcome Home, it might have been presumptuous to assume that Berlin’s stories were largely autobiographical or that characters resembling her were her ciphers. After divorcing a second jazz musician, she never married again, and to support her sons she worked as a physician’s assistant, a cleaning woman, a teacher, writing when she could manage it between bouts of devastating alcohol abuse. She had three husbands and four children before the age of 30, and roamed between New Mexico, New York, and Mexico, picking up for months at a time to live on the beach in Jalisco in a thatched hut with a white-sand floor, or to drive a Volkswagen van through Oaxaca down to Guatemala, kids asleep in the back. Her adult life, what is known of it, was as peripatetic as her childhood. Her mother suffered from debilitating depression and alcoholism, and her maternal grandfather, whom they lived with for a time and who appears in Berlin’s stories, drank and sexually abused Berlin. She was born in 1936 in Alaska, and her father, who worked as a mining engineer, moved the family every few years throughout the American West until the family settled in Chile when Lucia was a teenager. This scene’s appearance in both story and memoir also highlights the now apparent overlap between Berlin’s fiction and her extraordinary, difficult life. These two additions reveal how powerfully Berlin’s literary imagination was shaped by the twin beliefs seeded in her encounter with the recluse’s wallpaper: that stories can keep you company-keep you sane-during periods of deep loneliness, and that stories improve when they’re fractured and opened up for intervention.

Berlin’s short fiction came to wide attention, 11 years after her death in 2004, with the posthumous publication of A Manual for Cleaning Women, which is joined this fall by Welcome Home and another set of stories, Evening in Paradise. It’s a touch too poetic an origin story, maybe, but you can see its motifs-isolation, wilderness, a ragged narrative that needs to be reassembled-all over her body of work. In Welcome Home, Berlin suggests that this was her first lesson in literature.

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