A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin

Rating:7.5/10  

In the story, she said she had to find a job as a cleaning woman so she told her alcoholic husband died leaving four children behind. At first I thought she lied to get along, but later I thought that maybe it is just because it was unwilling truth. Also, the part that seemed to reflect the writer was the part that showed her hard days, and she steals sleeping pills unlike the various items that other cleaners steal. Thinking about this, she was probably trying to commit suicide because it was a very harsh situation.

 Thinking about the story again, she made her own unique manuals by visiting and interacting with many people's homes as a cleaning woman. There was talk of feminism, there was a description of these poor low-income people, and you could think about the United States of America at that time, about the 1980s. Personally, rather than talking deeply about one topic, I thought that various topics might have been incorporated into the images depicted by having an autobiographical character. Finally, I thought about the scene where she saw the men on her bike, the woman on Harley-Davidson, and the young men waving their hands on the truck, and I thought about it in two ways. The first time I saw this scene, I felt that she would not die on her own, and I also guessed that Terry’s death was related to a motorcycle or bicycle because it did not say how Terry died.

                                                      (Lucia Berlin)