I read Evening in Paradise in a single sitting, mesmerised by the places and characters, and what they revealed about the cultures of the times. Names recur but are intermingled. A character from one story will emerge in a different story, but with a different name, in a different place. Yet as you traverse the tapestry the book weaves, a single luminous thread ducks and bobs brilliantly throughout, holding it all together; a vibrant, generous, female character, gentle, strong and free, full of love, sorrow and mirth: meet Lucia Berlin.

Berlin’s life – or a version of it she wanted to imagine and present – lies in the foundation of every story. Semi-autobiographical, her characters travel through all the places Berlin did. We meet three husbands, four children, and a woman who writes while losing and finding herself in bottles of Jim Beam. It becomes impossible to confidently draw a line between fiction and autobiography. Did she turn herself into a modern artwork for her first husband (he was a sculptor, just like in the story)? Did she deal with a corpse off the coast of Mexico?

If characters Lucha, Laura, Maria, Maya, Clare and Maggie are one and the same, the book is almost as much a novel as it is short stories – one with a fascinating structure. Lucia Berlin is dead and the structure is a pastiche of somebody else’s construction, but I’m not sure it matters (didn’t Roland Barthes explain the death of the author in the ’60s?). Or perhaps it is more a memoir. As it so happens, an official memoir is also due out this month. It might even demystify some of this blurring between fact and fiction. It won’t reduce the resonance of Berlin’s writing. Besotted as I am by the woman that is Lucha-Laura-Maria-Maya-Clare-Maggie-Lucia, I can’t help but think it impossible you won’t be too.

Leanne Hermosilla works as a bookseller at Readings Carlton.