The Haunted Mind of Shirley Jackson
October 12, 2016 9:00 PM   Subscribe

 
I've had an advance copy of this biography on my "to be read" pile for several months--now I think l'll start it this weekend! I remember being fascinated by "The Lottery" when I read it in HS and absolutely loved most of her many other short stories when I discovered them as an adult. Thanks for motivating me to dig into this biography!
posted by bookmammal at 12:03 AM on October 13, 2016


As a reader who’s only got around to Shirley Jackson’s work this year, I’ve been thankful for this biography (even though I’m not sure I’ll read it) just for the spate of fine articles & reviews it has provoked. Jackson seems to me to be one of those writers whose stories are superficially interesting enough, but then all the more interesting the more one thinks about them, and tries reading between their lines. I’ve been grateful too for Jessica Ferri’s article You’re Probably Misreading ‘The Lottery’ having at first misread ‘The Lottery’ (or at least having missed out on some of its subtleties).
posted by misteraitch at 2:19 AM on October 13, 2016 [1 favorite]


go read "The Tooth"
posted by thelonius at 2:39 AM on October 13, 2016 [1 favorite]


Oooh, thank you for this! There was a Twitter meme going around recently where you named the three fictional characters who best represented you and I could only think of two (Liz Lemon from 30 Rock and Misty Berkowitz from Happy All the Time) and I KNEW there was another person my husband and I agreed I was and I couldn't think of it in time for the meme and then last night I woke up in the middle of the night and thought "Oh, it's Merricat" so this feels very timely in a personal way, plus Shirley Jackson is super neat.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 5:16 AM on October 13, 2016 [3 favorites]


laughter is possible laughter is possible laughter is possible

oh my heart.
posted by pretentious illiterate at 5:48 AM on October 13, 2016 [3 favorites]


oooh I only just read Shirley Jackson for the first time this year too (We Have Always Lived in the Castle SO GOOD!!!)

I will look forward to reading her biography along with more of her work!
posted by supermedusa at 8:37 AM on October 13, 2016


I was rereading parts of We Have Always Lived in the Castle recently and marveling at it. This is a great review--I've been on the fence about picking up this biography, but now I'm in. Though I should probably stop being a scaredy cat and read The Haunting of Hill House first.
posted by mixedmetaphors at 8:45 AM on October 13, 2016


Oh this article is so sad.
posted by 41swans at 9:01 AM on October 13, 2016


I still remember my experience of reading The Haunting of Hill House. It was a few years ago after the 1999 remake of The Haunting came out, and I read a review that said the movie sucked (I caught it on TV one night a few years later and yes, it did) but that the book was a classic. The night I began to read it I had recently moved into the condo I then owned, and as I began reading, I congratulated myself on living in a modern condo which bore no resemblance to the Victorian gothic Hill House. Surely this meant I would not get scared.

But. One of the idiosyncrasies of Hill House was that its interior doors would never stay open. Even if the characters left one propped open with the heaviest door stop they could find, such as a ponderous hassock, upon their return to it they'd find the hassock across the room and the door shut. And it so happened that one of the little idiosyncrasies of my condo were that whenever I had the windows open, as I usually did in summer, there was such air flow through the hallway where the bedrooms, bathroom, and laundry room doors were that the doors would never stay open. If I left them open and didn't prop them, the air flow would eventually slam them shut. So there I was reading away in bed about these Hill House doors that shut and occasionally hearing my own apartment doors slam shut.

When I finished the book I was so spooked by it that I had to relay myself to the kitchen by first turning on the hallway light and then the kitchen light instead of simply walking through the dark hallway and then turning on the kitchen light as I usually did. Then, after I got into bed and switched out the bedside lamp, my bedroom door slammed shut a final time, which I thought quite gratuitous of it.

I've read other works by Jackson since, but had never known anything about her life, so this post was interesting. I'm inclined to read this biography, but don't know if I will because I see some painful parallels between her life and mine and it'll be harder for me to have those prodded than to deal with doors that won't stay open.
posted by orange swan at 10:50 AM on October 13, 2016 [6 favorites]


The Haunting of Hill House scared me so badly when I read it the first time I couldn't get out of my chair for an hour after I finished it. I was literally frozen with terror.

I was reading it in the afternoon in the local public library. I shudder to think how terrified I'd've been if I'd been reading it alone, in the night.

In the dark.
posted by winna at 11:11 AM on October 13, 2016 [2 favorites]


I'm glad Shirley Jackson is finally getting some recognition! I love the American Gothic, and she is so masterful at writing the unreliable narrator to the point that for me, reading her works is an arm hair raising and disturbing experience.

Reading the Haunting of Hill House made me feel like I was the one going crazy. It's not the ghosts that are scary, but getting sucked into the protagonist's mind while being distracted by the idea of ghosts. Then all of a sudden, I find myself surrounded by Eleanor, not knowing what is real and what isn't. It is similar with We Have Always Lived in a Castle, though maybe not quite as creepy an experience.

On another note, the 1999 movie version of The Haunting of Hill House was so remarkably bad. A great example of how CGI can't carry a scary movie all by its self. I like the 1963 version -it is much more subtle so the few moments where it seems like something ghostly is happening seem much scarier, plus the black and white made the feeling of being trapped in a claustrophobic dark house more real. But my problem with the movies is that they focus on a haunted house, missing that the most frightening thing about the story is Eleanor's descent into...what? What is really happening?
posted by branravenraven at 12:48 PM on October 13, 2016 [2 favorites]


I recently read We Have Always Lived at the Castle and loved it. I think Jackson has not received her critical due, but maybe that's changing now.

The biography was also reviewed in the NYT: The Case for Shirley Jackson
posted by tuesdayschild at 1:24 PM on October 13, 2016


"The Lottery" is the least of Shirley Jackson. And neither is she a "horror" or writer of the supernatural. Those just happen to be some of her books. The whole of her oeuvre is worth investigating, and her life, like Flannery O'Conner's, is unusual and gothic in it's own right. She's a wonderfully strange and sometimes perfectly normal writer who had the kind of career you could only have had in the age of mass-circulation magazines with their insatiable need for short stories and serials.
posted by Modest House at 4:23 PM on October 13, 2016 [1 favorite]


And in the NYRB: Shirley Jackson in Love & Death - Joyce Carol Oates.
posted by misteraitch at 12:52 AM on October 14, 2016


I read Life Among the Savages last summer. It's a collection of her domestic humor stories. At some point reading it a switch flipped in my head and I realized that the husband portrayed in the book was a monster. It wasn't overt, but once you see what isn't said, it's quite brutal. It's a very funny book, but there's a bleak pit of despair underneath.
posted by Kattullus at 1:54 PM on October 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


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