But the writer possessed another side, one which is delightfully exposed in this hilariously charming memoir of her family's life in rural Vermont. Struggling with your children noticing and adopting the vices that you yourself cannot shed? When Shirley Jackson finds a pack of cigarettes inside her son’s fort, she tells him “with some heat that it was perfectly all right with me if he wanted to smoke and stunt his growth and ruin his wind for baseball and basketball and football and ping-pong it was a silly habit, I told him, expensive and useless, and if he wanted to smoke he could buy his own cigarettes and stop taking mine.Shirley Jackson, author of the classic short story "The Lottery", was known for her terse, haunting prose. Outward civility masking resentment toward the perfect parents one knows? Shirley Jackson smiles wider than you ever have, and seethes more fiercely than you ever could.
Airy unconcern about the state of one’s home, marriage, or children, masking a deeper unspoken acknowledgment that all will forever exist in a state of chaos? Shirley Jackson did it first. When you read these books-I suggest perusing them, martini in hand, while your children (or better your friends’ children, for whom you are babysitting) run around shrieking-you’ll see every parenting stance you’ve ever adopted, every parent-story trope you’ve ever told or heard, expressed more perfectly than you ever could have. But the story of Charles also demonstrates how much of the way most of us depict parenting when we tell our stories was presaged by Jackson’s slim, wonderful books.
It’s a twist worthy of the author of “ The Lottery,” which is the tale for which most readers know Shirley Jackson, and the confidence of her storytelling reminds the reader that in addition to that standard Jackson wrote many other stories and novels of psychological suspense.
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