Is it ironic or fitting that some of the greatest American writing about that venerated and difficult activity, motherhood, comes from a horror writer? I can’t decide.  Nonetheless, I recommend that on this most sentimental of days you run to your nearest bookstore and obtain copies of Shirley Jackson’s newly reprinted memoirs of motherhood. If nothing else they peel back some of the sentimental, insincere treacle that can attach to greeting-card-holidays like today’s. If you want to honour mothers, best to have some honest accounting of their particular art.  Originally published in the 1950s, at the height of conformist fetishization of the home and particularly of the woman who keeps it, Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons are packaged as light fare. They have all the markers of the sort of peacock-parenting that is now the scourge of your social media feeds.  The setting is bucolic: a ramshackle house in the woods of Vermont, which we are told over and over again has four tall white pillars, though these are presented as absurdities rather than crowning decorations. The children are precocious: one oft-cited passage describes Jackson’s son Laurie’s elaborate tales of “Charlie”, a classmate who does not exist. They misbehave only up to the point that it serves the comic anecdote.  But these are not, somehow, cheerful books. The seeds of dread are everywhere. In the middle of a comic anecdote, Jackson will admit that she’s listening to a her daughter’s story about an elephant who gave her bubblegum, one of those stories by children that goes on and on, while “smiling maternally”. When Jackson’s husband joins the scene he gets a similarly distant reaction: “I gave my husband another smile of patient, tolerant understanding, and asked him sweetly if he would care for coffee?” The edge is subtle, but it is there.  The critic and future Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin writes about that in this weekend’s New York Times Book Review, where she notes that among the people taken in by the faux-veneer of “fun” in Jackson’s memoirs was the American feminist Betty Friedan.  That’s the wrong way to approach it, she says: “Part of what Jackson mocks is her own ineptness at being a housewife – and, implicitly, the expectation that every woman belongs in that role. She pokes fun also at the idea that her children ought to be at the center of her universe, confessing her desire at times to leave them behind and check into a hotel.”  It’s not just the overt ironies, either, that make Jackson’s critical view of mothering so apparent.  I think it’s no accident, for example, that the creatures whose mannerisms Shirley Jackson most expertly describes are her cats. In an early scene in Life Among the Savages, an oft-pregnant expert huntress named Ninki brings a chipmunk into the house. It escapes her grasp and soon she has summoned the humans to help her recapture it. Jackson’s husband, the literary critic and New Yorker staff writer Stanley Edgar Hyman, brings along his air gun to help but his skills do not impress the cat:  Ninki was by this time irritated beyond belief by the general air of incompetence in the kitchen, and she went into the living room and got Shax, who is extraordinarily lazy and never catches his own chipmunks, but who is, at least, a cat, and preferable, Ninki saw clearly, to a man with a gun. Shax sized up the situation with a cynical eye, gave my husband the coldest look I have ever seen a cat permit himself, and then leaped onto the window sill and sat on the other side of the flowerpot.  The use of cats as a literary device is another bit of deceptively cute imagery. Assuming that you are a cat person, of course, the activities of cats endlessly fascinate. But they fascinate in part because we have transposed on them an indifference to, and even disdain about, human proceedings. Ninki undoubtedly did cast a cold eye on the affairs, but she is also clearly a vehicle for Jackson’s own critical, detached views on the proceedings. (Throughout this scene Jackson portrays herself as standing safely out of range, “as women should be when men are hunting”.)  There is, here as in every memoir, some question about the correlation of these stories to the reality of Jackson’s home life. We know from the one biography so far completed that Jackson’s marriage to Hyman was troubled by his innumerable affairs and controlling ways, and also that Jackson reacted with profound unhappiness to their life and descended into alcoholism and agoraphobia. Her darknesses surface more clearly in her fiction, of course; her novels and stories – like We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and The Haunting of Hill House – often have heroines whose minds are disintegrating in the face of abuse and violence.  There is nonetheless something rather magical about how Jackson managed to so transform that suffering into these comic masterpieces, laced with hints of the discontent that lies beneath. Not everyone would be able to keep such a cool head and eye out for the comedic amidst the squalor. Except, perhaps, a character in another Shirley Jackson story.
The horror writer penned two amusing books on family life Vermont, but among the laughs is a sharp critique of our expectations of maternity