Life Among the Savages by Shirley Jackson

I cannot think of a preferable way of life, except one without children and without books.” “This is the way of life my husband and I have fallen into, inadvertently, as though we had fallen into a well and decided that since there was no way out we might as well stay there and set up a chair and desk and a light of some kind. “We also own assorted beds and tables and chairs and rocking horses and lamps and doll dresses and ship models and paint brushes and literally thousands of socks.

When we moved into it we had two children and about 5,000 books I expect that when we finally overflows and move out again we will have perhaps twenty children and easily half a million books.

“Our house,” she says, “is old and noisy and full. When the lease on their city apartment was not renewed, Jackson, her husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, and their children moved to Vermont. I say abnormal because I’ve never met any, except my own, who were normal. She has husband who shoots at bats and four will and abnormal children. She’s a young and pleasant and humorous person who puts up with an awful lot from her family. The influence of these mid- to late-20th century “momoirs” reverberates into today’s motherhood blogs, the numbers of which stretch into the infinite on the web.įrom the original 1953 review by Jerry Parker in The Press-Democrat (CA) of Life Among the Savages: Readers of Shirley Jackson’s earlier stories, “The Lottery,” and Hangsaman, who may have thought she was like the witch in Charles Addams’ New Yorker cartoons, are in for a pleasant surprise when they read Life Among the Savages. These cleaned-up memoirs may well have inspired the genre that Laura Shapiro called “the literature of domestic chaos,” later perfected by Jean Kerr and Erma Bombeck. It turns out that Life Among the Savages, and its follow-up, Raising Demons, were idealized (and somewhat-to-fairly fictionalized) portrayals of the family’s chaotic life and individual eccentricities. So when she came out with Life Among the Savages in 1953, reviewers were delighted and surprised by her cheery and wry observations of life with four children and husband in a shabby, rambling house in Vermont. Shirley Jackson’s haunting classic short story “The Lottery” made her famous in 1948, and subsequent books cemented her brand of psychological terror.

Life Among the Savages by Shirley Jackson