“By now she also calls me ‘Honestly, Mother!’
and ‘Mother, really’ and sometimes just plain ‘Mother.’ She
worries constantly about her figure—usually with one hand in the refrigerator. She
thinks any beardless adolescent who sings through his nose is ‘cute.’ She has
perceived that in addition to being slightly behind the times in my dress and
manner, I am hopelessly dated in my grasp of teenagers–especially of what
‘everyone else’ is allowed to do. This, incidentally, is a phrase I can't even
write without feeling a little chill down my back. My daughter says it without
difficulty. I tell her, ‘I don’t care what everyone else does…’ and ‘No
daughter of mine is going to…’ and ‘When I was your age, I had…’ Neither of us
listens to the other. She no longer thinks boys are silly.”—American horror and
humor writer Shirley Jackson (1916-1965), “Motherly, Honestly!”, originally
printed in Good Housekeeping, reprinted in Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings, edited by Laurence Hyman and Sarah
Hyman DeWitt (2015)
It can be hard to believe that the author of such
disturbing fiction as “The Lottery,” The Haunting of Hill House, and We
Have Always Lived in the Castle could deliver slices of wry like the above passage to
the same primary audience—American housewives and mothers—as Erma Bombeck
would later do.
But these humorous essays on her family—whose tone
could also be modulated to ironic short fiction like “Charles”—helped pay the
bills for Shirley Jackson, as she raised the four children of herself
and her husband, the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman.
And they can still be appreciated by readers—even those
who, in October, might be more tempted to seek out the macabre novels and short
stories that make Jackson a crucial link between Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King.
For a brief description of the life and career of
Jackson, see my blog post from six years ago, on the centennial of her
birth.
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