On Shirley Jackson

My brand spanking new copy of Ruth Franklin's Shirley Jackson A Haunted Life arrived in the mail today from Amazon. Did you hear my life screech to a halt as I sat down to crack the cover and dive into this new biography of my favorite American author?

I first encountered Shirley Jackson in (and this will date me for sure) junior high (7-8th grade-the term middle school did not exist then) when we read The Lottery. It was a disturbing little story, and I didn't really care for it, however, I did like the writing style of the author. There was something unsettling and edgy to her writing. You could feel anxiety and resolution radiating off the printed page.

In one of my high school English classes we read an excerpt titled 'Charles,' which is a chapter from Jackson's book Life Among the Savages. It was wildly amusing. I couldn't believe the author of The Lottery had written this funny story. I believe the high school drama club put on the play The Haunting of Hill House in my junior year. It was very well done.

And then Shirley Jackson kind of slipped back into the sea of authors lapping at the shores of my life until 1991 when my daughter was born. I began selling off the bulk of my huge teddy bear collection. I met a young woman from Albuquerque NM by mail. She bought some bears and we became pen pals, writing frequently to one another. She was a huge fan of Emily Dickinson (and so jealous that I lived a short drive away from Amherst, MA) and an even bigger fan of Shirley Jackson. During the course of our correspondence she bemoaned the fact that some of her Jackson books had been donated and lost so she no longer had the whole library of the author's work. I made it my mission to track down copies of the books she was missing and replaced them on her birthday and at Christmas. In doing so, I also bought copies for myself and built my own Jackson library, remembering that I had enjoyed her writing in high school- I basically rediscovered her. My collection grew to include Jackson biographies, Jackson story collections that have been released over the past 15 to 20 years, and a typewritten copy of a play she'd written for school aged kids (it's in a cabinet in the den, but I believe it was about the Salem Witch Trials.)

If any one writer has influenced my own writing, it is Shirley Jackson. A long time ago, pre-2000, I wrote a story titled Such Pretty Eyes. It was about an ordinary young housewife in the early sixties who keeps house, takes the bus downtown to shop, and occasionally has lunch out. She's married to a man who is rather self-absorbed, a company man who brings work home with him, and who basically neglects her, takes her for granted. She's a pretty young lady with extraordinary eyes other men often compliment her on. In her home she feels invisible, unseen...and resentment begins to eat away at her psyche like an acid. One night, after dinner, she stabs her husband to death.

OMG! I let my mother read this story and she hated it! "What did you write this for?" she'd demanded. I'd replied, "It's just a story!" You'd have thought I'd killed a real person or something!

But then I got to thinking about it. My story had gotten a rather volatile reaction from a woman who read a lot, who was a nurse and dealt with people, who had done part of her nurse's training at Northampton State Hospital so therefore had rubbed elbows with the insane. Authors do not write stories to lull readers to sleep. They write stories to jab and poke at social, emotional, psychological and other issues and evoke a reaction in the reader, even if it's just to make them think for a moment. Even if you throw the book aside in disgust I have done my job by prodding something that you've reacted to and you've made the conscious choice to ignore it.

I evoked a response from my mother, that's for sure. There was nothing graphic in the story- just a slow unraveling of the young lady's psyche until she reached the point where she spiraled out of control and committed an act of violence which to her, in that moment, was the only way in her mind that she could resolve the bad marriage she was trapped in.

I learned to write at the phantom knee of Shirley Jackson. She died when I was still a little girl. I sometimes like to daydream about having been born sooner, of driving up to Vermont, finding her home, being invited to sit down at the kitchen table for coffee while she smoked cigarettes and talked about her family, her writing- in between trips to the stove to stir something that was cooking and hanging laundry out to dry in the bright sunshine, nudging cats aside with her ankle. She was an ordinary woman with an extraordinary talent.

Every author (whether they admit it or not) has an author idol- and Shirley Jackson is mine.