“i am so lonely now that i am shocked when i remember being a child and a adolescent; i thought i was lonely then. -Shirley Jackson”

I took my time savoring this book of personal letters. It was like spending time with Shirley in her own words. If you enjoyed Life Among the Savages or Raising Demons, you will likely enjoy all the additional family anecdotes that are detailed in her letters.

This book gives a great insight into the life and mind of a creative person juxtaposed against a mid-century housewife. I found her letter to Stanley particularly powerful. I could feel her sadness and hurt over his infidelity.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for sending me a free copy of this ebook in exchange for an unbiased review.

Accidentally submitted a review for another book--will update soon with the review for this one! Sorry!

It was so fascinating to get this behind the scenes look at Jackson's life in her own voice. Any fans or scholars of Jackson will want to pick this up. It's quite long but it's easy to pick up and savor pieces over the long haul. This might not be approachable to someone unfamiliar with Jackson's work but it would still be enjoyable.

Before reading this collection of Shirley Jackson’s letters, I had never read anything by the author. Having read this, I can now say I am a fan of her writing. If her letters were this interesting I can only imagine how amazing her other works must be. She turns mundane activities like going to the dentist and the nuances of her children’s lives into a compelling story. She could have written a grocery list and I probably would have been completely engrossed.

This book is a vast collection of letters that Shirley Jackson wrote over the course of nearly three decades from the time of her youth to six days before she passed away. Some of her earliest letters were to her future husband, Stanley, to her parents whom she consistently addressed as “mom and pop”, to her various agents and publishing friends, to fans, to her friends, and later, to her children as they got older. In her letters, Shirley chose to copy Stanley’s style and write in lowercase letters with little punctuation because she wasn’t a fan of the semicolon. Who is?

I loved reading all her letters, but some that stand out to me were her letters to Stanley when they were young. She was very bold and did not shy away from discussing Stanley’s other girlfriends that he had while being committed to Shirley.

Medicine seems like it was trial and error back then, at least for Shirley. In one letter she writes how she became sick with a throat infection and was told to drink hydrogen peroxide! It’s no shock that that made her much worse until she saw a specialist who told her that was “wrong wrong wrong.” Or, how when she was due to go into labour years later, another doctor told her to drink castor oil mixed with a drink she didn’t like because she would never want to have that drink again. So she mixed half a glass of castor oil with another half of cream soda. Yum.

As her children grew up, I enjoyed reading her letters about them. She wrote a lot about how much money she was making from her short stories and books, which surprisingly was never enough. It made me wonder how much other authors of her caliber were making at the time.

There was one letter Shirley wrote later in her life to her husband that made me feel sad for her that Stanley was belittling her and her achievements. Another letter she wrote to herself was equally heartbreaking. It seems that Stanley was against her writing about anything that didn’t bring in money. She had to coach herself to be strong. In her forties, Shirley started experiencing severe anxiety and agoraphobia that she eventually sought help for from a therapist.

This collection was a tome that I ended up taking my time with by reading about fifty pages a day, usually on the weekends. I am now excited to go back and read her other works now that I have a lot of insight into her writing process.

I could go on and on about the letters of Shirley Jackson, but I’ll stop here and hope you end up reading this collection and loving it as much as I did!

Thank you to Netgalley and Random House Publishing Group for the digital ARC.

“dear mrs. white, if you don’t like my peaches, don’t shake my tree. sincerely, shirley jackson”. July 24, 1957.

I am a Shirley Jackson fan. I remember watching The Lottery when I was in grade school. It was the early 1970s, and I was just happy that the nuns were not showing another religious film strip. That is my only memory of it, but I remember the name: Shirley Jackson. As an adult, I have watched The Haunting (1963) many times, always marveling how that banging was the most frightening thing I had ever experienced in a movie. It was then that I sought out The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, and read my very first purely horrific novel (I realized part of me was Eleanor!). In The Letters of Shirley Jackson (edited by her eldest son Laurence Jackson Hymen), I was treated to an inside look of her as she wrote these and many of her other books and articles. I read every single letter, afraid I would miss something. Because, as her son states, she enjoyed writing these as much—at times more—as writing fiction. It shows.

The Letters of Shirley Jackson contains 300 letters sent to 20 people spanning 27 years (1938-1965). Some of the recipients include her parents, children, friends, agents, publishers, and fans. Many of these letters read like her fiction, “blurring the boundary between reality and fiction” (Introduction written by Bernice M. Murphy). The letters are, as her son Laurence Jackson Hyman, “The self-reported account of a short and extremely creative life.” However, the content of these letters does not reveal the real life she experienced with her husband, Stanley Hyman. Instead of recounting his affairs, demeaning comments, and lack of involvement with the family, we read about his attentiveness, support, and engagement with the children and home.
We learn a lot about Shirley Jackson, much of it sad. She suffered from severe anxiety and agoraphobia, at times unable to leave her home for months. She used prescribed drugs to help her until 1963, when she finally chose to start psychoanalysis. She had several periods of ill-health, suffering a coronary event in 1956, two bouts of colitis in 1960 and 1961, pneumonia in 1965, and then her death August 8, 1965 from another coronary event. She drank a lot and had an unhealthy relationship with her body and food, which did not help any of the above.

The most heart-wrenching letters are the ones that she did not send. Shirley received a letter from her mother in which she criticizes her daughter’s appearance, says her husband and children are ashamed of her, and that she is ungrateful and thoughtless. Shirley wrote a letter (September 25, 1962) in which she takes her mother to task for her comments, asking when will she “realize that i am a grown up”, and stating “i have just had enough of the unending comments on my appearance and my faults.” Another was to her husband, Stanley (November 1962?) where she predicts he’ll start a fight so that he can, “…arrange to go off to new york in december in a state of domestic warfare, justifying you in whatever big city plans you can make.” The last letter is the one to herself (1963) where she writes, “it is now clear to me—after a year spent hoping and endeavoring to make sense from an impossible situation—that stanley intends at all costs to obstruct my serious writing in any way he can. he is perfectly happy with my money-writing (magazines) happy to think that after so much work i have at last achieved a point where i can make a great deal of money, which he cannot, by simply writing…he will not allow me to write anything in which I feel that i am doing more than only writing for money.”

She closes the letter with the repeated phrases of: “i will be not afraid. i will do what I am set to do and nothing else. i will not.”

Although I received the electronic book free, I have pre-ordered the hard copy of the book. I want to savor it as a written testimony on paper; just like she wrote it. It would also allow me easy access to and from the copious endnotes.

I would like to thank NetGalley and Random House for the opportunity to read and review this book.

I adore Shirley Jackson. The woman is a genius. I am always thrilled to see a new celebration of her incredible wit, and this did not disappoint.

Fans of Shirley Jackson will love this! In 'The Letters Of Shirley Jackson', we get to see a personal side to her through letters. Reading this, I feel more connected to her and her writing! It is always interesting to see a writer's process.