When I looked at the photo of our library–republished here because I accidentally deleted it–I saw 2 books by and about a woman writer I idolize and I knew I wanted to share them with you, so I took them down from the shelf. I handled them as if they were treasures.
Shirley Jackson was the author of the terrifying short story “The Lottery” that many of us read in high school. She was also the author of 2 lesser known and hilarious books about motherhood: Life Among the Savages, and Raising Demons. She wrote these while keeping house for her professor husband and raising their four children.
Next to this well-read collection of her work is a brilliant biography by Judy Oppenheimer titled Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson. Here I learned that Shirley had many phobias. Here I learned that she was judged not merely on her work, but on her appearance. She was, oh, horrors!– overweight.
When Time magazine ran a picture of Shirley along with a flattering review of one of her books, Shirley’s mother wrote: “Why oh why do you allow the magazines to print such awful pictures of you?. . .Your children love you for your achievements but they also want you to be worth looking at too.” (p.245, Private Demons). Her mother constantly chided her for being overweight and allowing her house, with its 4 children and many dogs & cats, to be messy. Her mother’s constant criticism about her weight and her appearance led to Shirley taking all sorts of “magic pills”. Amphetamines. Tranquilizers. Alcohol. Together.
Shirley Jackson died in her sleep when she was forty-eight.
My birthday is the same as Shirley Jackson’s (Dec. 14), and reading Life Among the Savages gave me the courage to write about women, family, home, and children, all part of what one bookstore owner said when my first novel, Stepping, came out was in the “Dirty Diaper Field” of fiction. One of my favorite first paragraphs of all literature is from Life Among the Savages:
“Our house is old, and noisy, and full. When we moved into it we had two children and about five thousand books; I expect that when we finally overflow and move out again we will have perhaps twenty children and easily half a million books. . .” ( p 385, The Magic of Shirley Jackson).
photo from Private Demons
I love Shirley Jackson. I’m grateful to Judy Oppenheimer for her enlightening biography. And I’ll be writing more about Shirley Jackson in my later blogs.