Eleven years after her death, Lucia Berlin has become a literary sensation. Her story collection A Manual for Cleaning Women hit the New York Times best-seller list last week, amid accolades heralding her as a lost “genius.” Even as her health began to collapse, 20 years ago, Lucia was instilling that genius in a younger cadre of writers including me. She has been the guiding force in my work, and my life, long after she died.

Lucia and I entered a creative-writing program the same day. Boulder, 1994. Beautiful, sanitized, very white. She was 58, me 33. Teacher, grad student; University of Colorado. She shook her head when I walked in. “Oh, you’re going to be trouble.”

I tried to look invisible. How did she know? But then I noticed she was smiling, almost giddy.

Nearly all Lucia taught me came individually, outside the classroom. We were both searchers, wanderers. She had lived several lifetimes. She was raised like a debutante, adhered to etiquette, shared her first cigarette with a prince on a yacht off Viña del Mar. Enchanté. And then ran off to New York City, hung out with artists and Beats, married a sculptor and two jazz musicians in six years, and obliterated her health on Jim Beam over decades. She raised four boys as an alcoholic single mother, hiding the bottles in the washing machine, when she could afford one.

I had lived in 10 cities on three continents since dropping out of college to enlist in the infantry. I’d been a punk rocker and a management consultant in Kuwait. I had just returned from the desert, rattled by re-entry. I had not yet fully accepted I was a homo.

Lucia knew none of this yet. But she had a sense of me. Instantly.

We nearly lost Lucia that first semester. Before the autumn colors peaked, she was rushed to the hospital. Double scoliosis had punctured a lung years ago, so fresh trouble in the good one was life threatening. I went to visit her. Instead of flowers, I brought a ficus from Home Depot. I pictured her doting over it through a long, slow recovery. Then I saw her room: all the tubes and machinery swallowed up in beautiful floral arrangements. She looked groggy from the morphine, labored breathing through a clear nasal tube. I backed out, stashed my tree in the hallway, and slipped back in.

“What are you hiding?” she asked.

She insisted I fetch it.

“It’s a ficus.” I set it down, looked away.

She laughed hard, almost choked. “I know, darling.” She reached out to squeeze my hand. “It’s lovely.”

That’s my first memory of the feelings that come over me when I remember Lucia: Secure. Respected. Loved.

It was fleeting that first time.

“What an unusual choice,” she said. “Tell me why.”

“I don’t know.”

“You do.”

I wasn’t about to say it—this had been a mistake, my classmates had been right, it was inappropriate to come.

She pressed, and I spilled: she seemed to like to nurture things.

She smiled and the room softened again. She could tell there was a “sweetness” in me. If I wanted to shy away from that stuff, I should pick a new profession, she advised.

Much of what Lucia taught me came directly through her stories. Raw nuggets of harsh reality, laced with peculiar insights. So often, they mirrored my own foibles, in odd ways that cracked us both up.

“You better get over your looks before you lose them,” she told me. “Once they’re gone, it will be too late. You’ll never get over it.”

Lucia had been a dazzling beauty, but I knew her as the kindly grandmother out of a children’s fable. She was permanently tethered to an oxygen tank after that hospital stay: wheeling a mobile tank behind her on a little cart, fumbling with the plastic tubing in her nostrils when she got anxious, ripping it out when I truly exasperated her. She would make her point, smile again, and settle it back in.

I was closing in on 40 by then, repeating her mistakes. Sleeping around frantically, to prove someone wanted me. Hot guys, preferably: desired by the desirable. My self-doubt riddled my writing, Lucia said. She cut to the heart of my problems—with men, with friendships, my work. She was brutally honest, yet compassionate, the way she was with her characters.

Write what you see, not what you want to see, Lucia said. Or what you assume. “Look. Really look.”

She instilled candor, but went further in her own work, to audacity. “Cleaning women do steal”—but not what you might expect. Lucia calls female characters fat and hefty and a boy retarded. Because he was. Same page, she describes the victim of a public sex crime as “an ugly, shy little girl.” Because the charismatic boy with the luxurious eyelashes and gold crucifix glittering against his smooth brown chest was vicious enough to pluck the saddest kid to humiliate. The callous brutality of the abuser is revealed.

Lucia had contempt for bigots, homophobes, or anyone trying to sanitize descriptions. Some girls were ugly, some were whores. Some predators were gorgeous and intoxicating. Grime could be alluring. In my favorite story, “My Jockey,” she undresses her crumpled jockey as an E.R. nurse. “His boots smelled of manure and sweat, but were as soft and dainty as Cinderella’s.” The beauty enchants her, regardless of the stench—or the pain.

Lucia had an eye for beauty—she plucked it out everywhere. Devout Catholic children in an old Mission school “who trembled their morning prayers.” The playfulness of the old nuns in the same story: “loved by their God and by their children.” Lucia’s aging nuns were gleeful, because they got to teach the little kids, who “responded to love with tenderness.” The young nuns were gaunt and nervous: forced to teach jaded middle schoolers: “they could not use awe or love. . . . Their recourse was impregnability, indifference to the students who were their duty and their life.”

Lucia’s guidance was quiet and subtle, with one memorable exception: the tyranny of the preachy narrator. Write your characters as ghastly as you like, she said, but get off their backs.

Chekhov was her hero, for his fierce discipline toward impartiality. A princess and a chambermaid, she said—Chekhov would treat them exactly the same. Lucia let that sink in and then probed to see if I’d internalized that as ennoble the maid. Of course. It was the princess I had to look out for, she said—most writers were likely to dis her. And the maid didn’t need my pity or false praise.

Much of what Lucia taught me came from reading her stories, and watching the raw and brutal sweetness reflected in our conversations. But what luck to have her there to unravel the techniques that escaped me. Like the musicality of her prose. The rhythm evoked the mood. It reminded me of Huck Finn: those loping, luxurious sentences wafting down lazy the river, pitted against the jarring, atonal clash of consonants on the shore. How did she do that? Could she show me?

“Oh, darling.”

“Darling” was a great sign or a really bad one. She said it when I made her giggle, which was constantly, but definitely not going over my work. How had I gotten into this program? (She confessed years later, once I’d become a real writer, that she’d seen no hope for me that first year.)

“Doesn’t work that way.”

She asked whether I thought about the scene as I wrote it, pictured it in my head, or experienced it in my body, as if it were happening to me.

I thought about it.

“Feel it,” she said.

Oh, I did that too, felt it like crazy sometimes as I dreamed it up—

“While you’re writing it.”

“While?”

“While. You need to feel it. That’s why you’re struggling.”

I liked the idea, actually: each re-creation could color in fresh details and maybe tease out more ideas. But I was looking for help with the melody, not the lyrics.

It will fix that, too, she assured me. “Just try it.”

I tried it and was astounded, instantly, by the results. Not just the pacing—the sentences, magically, knowing just when to shrivel and elongate—but the language, the intensity, words I reached for, the precision it gave me to sniff out the tiniest flaw. Method writing. I was there.

It transformed my work.

Lucia had a huge impact on my book Columbine. It’s hard to imagine what it would look like without her. But the limits of what Lucia taught me were tested after she died. Could I live up to her edict of impartiality with mass murderers? One of the Columbine killers was extraordinarily loving—could my narrator depict that vividly yet withhold his anger? The method writing was harder. It had become second nature, but then I had to face the heroic teacher Dave Sanders bleeding to death for three hours. Writing through the emotion meant re-entering Science Room 3 in my mind, every day for a month, to re-experience the horror through a different student or teacher, who fought to save Dave, or stood by feeling impotent. I got the chapter out, then I had a breakdown. After I recovered, I understood why Lucia’s characters crackled to life so vividly. And I sensed what they cost.

Lucia’s stories read grubby, like the seedier characters from a Louie CK bit, but alcoholics drink for a reason. Her method writing meant remaining sober through daily trips back into the bottle. Must have been painful, but also . . . dangerous? She enjoyed her wild years. Did it threaten her sobriety? Too late to ask.

I felt Lucia as I wrote. Over my shoulder, those last five years on my book, after she’d gone. I would chat with her frequently, out loud in my head. I flipped my friend’s Vespa scooter directly in front of her tombstone on day—waving good-bye with one hand on the rutty dirt road, cracking one last joke. My ankle snapped in two. Dumbass move, front-row seat for her. I pictured her wetting her pants laughing.

But I wish I’d asked, when I had the chance, how much the method writing hurt.

So much of Lucia’s life was a struggle. It was better for a while in Boulder, but rough again at the end. Surviving records indicate that her last two books probably sold fewer than 1,000 copies each, and that she sold more books over the last two weeks than through her entire life.

She got sicker. Lung cancer. Lucia had an incredible pain tolerance, but radiation got to her. She said it felt like grinding your bones to dust. Her health deteriorated to the point she had to retire in 2000. She moved into a trailer park on the ratty edge of Boulder, and later, a converted garage behind her son’s house outside Los Angeles. I visited there once. It was cozy in the euphemistic sense. She was a little embarrassed, but relieved that he took her in.

We had the phone now, about once a week. I made her giggle, incessantly; she loved that.

Before she died, Lucia told me she wanted me to know how much I meant to her.

“Of course—”

She cut me off. No, I didn’t get it. She treasured knowing me—it had been a gift.

Thanks, I said. Me too.

A week later, Friday, November 12, 2004, her name popped up on caller I.D. I picked up.

“Lucia! How are you?”

There was a pause, then a male voice. Her son let me know that she had died. In her bed, tucked in with a favorite book.

Lucia was particular about her gifts. She ran an emotional home for wayward adult children, a sprawling brood of us, and she knew what each of us needed. Confidence for me. Hers, to carry with me. To the person I admired most in this world, I mattered back.

Lucia’s greatest gift was not something she taught me. She told me she loved me. Lucia said it all the time. “I love you, darling.” Effortless. Made it so easy to say it back. Thanks, darling. I love you.