The stories we tell ourselves
(Encore issue) Finding simpatico in an author from another generation
This issue first came out July 1. I'm still a fan of Shirley Jackson, and I still haven't read The Haunting of Hill House. Expect new issues of Finding Out starting September 30. See you then!
Although I haven't read The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson's most well known novel, I often find myself thinking of her.
Horror is the rare genre that I avoid in all media, having only made exceptions for a preteen I once babysat (her mother explicitly said she could watch them) and for a double date I went on around the same time. Nearly two decades later, when our book club chose Hill House for our monthly selection, I told myself I should give it a try… and I told myself, and told myself, and told myself, and then, a week before the meeting, decided, “Yeah, I'm not going to read it.”
A few days before we gathered at a local bar specializing in an array of chili mac, I turned to my other go-to tactic for book club meetings where I haven't read the book: I looked up articles about and interviews of the author.
And that is how I came to so admire Shirley Jackson’s writerly life.
The most satisfying of the pieces I found was by biographer Ruth Franklin, adapted for The Cut from Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life. She starts with “The Lottery,” which I realized I knew from Honors Lit in high school, although I didn’t remember its context.
Jackson’s short story captivated and shocked so many New Yorker readers when it was published in 1948, that the resulting love and hate mail outnumbered that for any other piece previously in the magazine. Reading the story again myself, I was immediately enamored with how Jackson guides the reader into an eerily familiar town.
Continuing to explore Jackson's work, I found the drawings of the fictional Hill House that Franklin mentions in her article. The pencil lines were thin yet evocative, and brought a smile of comprehension to my face. To discover a woman writer who both wrote and sketched felt so special.
Many months later, when I read some of her essays, I learned that Jackson was annoyed with what she saw as the degrading quality of her contemporary, Dr. Seuss, especially when publishers were unenthusiastic about the children's books she authored. I remember the essay as being charming yet cutting, with just a bit of imposter syndrome thrown in. Searching our public library to see if she got to publish for children, I found Nine Magic Wishes, and the story is delightfully quirky, and so like how kids tell stories.
But it wasn't only Jackson's craft that impressed me. It was the life within which she worked.
Jackson had four kids, and Franklin claims that it was the existence of these children who led to Jackson's success. While I bristle to give that much credit to them without learning more about the details of her journey, the assertion still gives me hope.
In a lecture, Jackson once said, “All the time that I am making beds and doing dishes and driving to town for dancing shoes, I am telling myself stories.” So, I give myself permission to do the same, to let my mind wander to understanding and this newsletter while I play with our child or do chores, though I find my musings are most helpful when they accompany our walks outside.
But whatever my tactics, and however it's going, I like to think of this woman, a woman like me from more than seventy years ago. If Jackson can write while raising a family in the 1950s, when white women were so much more discouraged from working than now, surely I can succeed today.
Mentioned in this issue: The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson; “The Novelist Disguised As a Housewife” by Ruth Franklin for The Cut; Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin; “The Lottery,” by Shirley Jackson; “A Vroom for Dr. Seuss” by Shirley Jackson, found in Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings; and Nine Magic Wishes, by Shirley Jackson.