“When I first used to write stories and hide them away in my desk, I used to think that no one had ever been so lonely as I was and I used to write about people all alone…I thought I was insane and I would write about how the only sane people are the ones who are condemned as mad and how the whole world is cruel and foolish and afraid of people who are different.” — Shirley Jackson, unpublished essay
It is her birthday today. Although she is one of my favorite authors, I had never read Hangsaman until a couple years ago. What an amazing strange book. Eerie. Smart. And boy does it capture what it feels like to be 18 years old. It’s terrifying and upsetting.
I was introduced to Shirley Jackson, like most people were, I suppose, through “The Lottery”, which was on my high school curriculum. The story made a huge impression. Once you read it, you never forget it. I read it the same year I read 1984 – also because of the high school curriculum – and those two things, together, helped formulate my own ideas about groupthink, autocracy, mindless following of authority, etc., all of which has been a lifelong obsession, as anyone who reads me knows already. Jackson captures it all in eerily flat and everyday prose, that also manages to be unbearably menacing. Her stock-in-trade.
But she had an interesting split in her nature, in her life and in her writing life. She had four children with her husband, and wrote a couple of hilarious books about parenting – precursors to Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, precursors to Nora Ephron, Erma Bombeck, far FAR ahead of her time. She looked at parenting as the chaotic venture that it was, and instead of giving tips on how to be a perfect parent, she just related the craziness of raising four “savages”, and it was completely unlike anything else available for parents out there at the time. This is an aspect of Shirley Jackson that is often forgotten – and was completely ignored in Shirley, the 2020 film starring Elizabeth Moss as Jackson (which I reviewed for Ebert). Jackson was a regular contributor to Good Housekeeping, Ladies Home Journal, Woman’s Home Companion, and her irreverent hilarious pieces about motherhood struck a warm chord in readers, hungry for non-judgmental and relatable parenting advice.
Jackson was ENMESHED in domesticity – Mothering. Chores. Cooking – and this bleeds into her work. Sometimes domesticity is hilarious and raucous and ridiculous, as in her parenting books. But sometimes … sometimes … it’s not funny at all. This was the split in Jackson’s nature, the threat she felt in other women’s homes, in her own home, in neat little villages, in town squares, in pruned gardens … There’s something Lynchian about how she sees it all. The horrors beneath “normalcy.”
There was a piece in The New Republic about “The Lottery”, published in The New Yorker in 1948:
She put away her groceries, put the baby in a playpen, and in a single sitting wrote the story, which describes, without elaboration or allegory, a village ritual in which the inhabitants gather annually to stone one of their neighbors. Her agent did not like it, but sold it to The New Yorker nonetheless. Soon after it was published, letters began to pour into the post office in the rural Vermont town where she was then living—more than three hundred of them, the most The New Yorker had ever seen for a work of fiction. Some of the letter-writers informed her that they were cancelling their subscriptions. Others wrote to express their puzzlement or to demand an explanation. But many, assuming that the story was based on fact, wanted to know where lotteries like the one Jackson described were held. “Are you describing a current custom?” asked a reader from Pennsylvania. “I have read of some queer cults in my time,” wrote a reader from Los Angeles, “but this one bothers me.”
Jackson’s collection of short stories should be read in its entirety. They are a disturbing read. Domesticity is a nightmare. Other housewives are a nightmare. (You can feel that in “The Lottery” too. Other housewives will stone you without blinking an eye if they’re asked to.) Jackson writes about loneliness, alienation, dissociation, split psyches, madness. The Haunting of Hill House is maybe her most well-known novel (and the recent TV series has NOTHING to do with Jackson’s novel. It was so irritating. Get your own damn title, TV series) – but We Have Always Lived in the Castle is her masterpiece.
She was unhealthy all her life. She was a chain-smoker, a heavy drinker, and obese. She died of heart failure, in her sleep, at the age of 48. It is a great loss to American literature. But, my God, what power she was able to summon while she was here.
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
