MixedBookforum\"Occasionally Welcome Home has the succinctness and survivor’s humor that mark Berlin’s stories ... Welcome Home was written in the early 2000s, after Berlin’s most intimate biographical stories had been published, we might expect the memoir to go further than the fiction, to give us something more like a definitive portrait of Lucia Berlin. I’m not sure that it does ... Sharp details, but there’s little in Welcome Home to rival the lurid, often grotesque, precision with which El Paso is rendered in [Berlin\'s] stories ... Being tied down doesn’t suit Berlin; this is one reason why Welcome Home, a singular account of a kaleidoscopically complex past, doesn’t work as well as the fiction.\
