The book was very interesting and I learnt a lot, but I truly hated Shirley's husband, who was portrayed as a selfish user, an adulterer and a possible rapist; I kept asking myself why she married him at all. There are also horrible parents, mean friends and gossipy neighbours, to make it all even more depressing. My enjoyment - zero stars. All in all, three stars from me. ( )

It’s been a long time (years) since I’ve read such an exceptional, polished biography. Ruth Franklin’s book is a finely edited, smooth-flowing, easy to follow story of the author of one of my all-time favorite novels, [b:We Have Always Lived in the Castle|89724|We Have Always Lived in the Castle|Shirley Jackson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1415357189l/89724._SX50_.jpg|847007]
At just over 500 pages, it provides a quality view of Shirley Jackson’s life, paying especial attention to her development as a writer. Franklin seldom repeats herself, and offers critique and meaning on the writer’s work, interlaced with the views of Jackson’s contemporaries. The novels and short stories are illuminated, and that, to me, is what makes this biography so good.
The chronology of chapters are laid out perfectly, without the switching back and forth in time that seems to be the practice of a lot of modern biographers. We get an easy-to-read chronicle of Jackson’s life that is both thorough and concise. Each chapter is titled with a reference to its main theme, also noting the years encompassed. She goes in depth discussing the metamorphosis of each novel, and in particular Jackson’s famous short-story, [b:The Lottery|6219656|The Lottery|Shirley Jackson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348757577l/6219656._SY75_.jpg|15161007].
We also learn a great deal about the times in which Jackson lived--through McCarthy’s Red Scare, and into the Cold War. Literary criticism and the publishing industry of the era are given ample explanation as well.
Although Jackson’s husband, Stanley Hyman is discussed a bit much for my taste, he was so instrumental in Jackson’s life, for better or worse, it would be impossible to tell her story without going into that detail. If Jackson’s life was “haunted”, the goblins were Hyman and her mother, Geraldine. Those two certainly put a depressing, aggravating mojo on her. There was no pleasing her condescending mother. She belittled Jackson her entire life. Stanley had more faults than a human has a right to have, and he was also weird as hell. While Shirley was in college, Stanley carried around her pessary, and showed it to anyone who would look. ‘Nuff said.
The photos scattered throughout are a bonus, except I found a lot of them printed too small. I had to pull out a magnifying glass on a few of them to even read the captions.
If you’re a fan of Jackson’s work, you should definitely read this biography. I love her novels, and after reading this, I’m certain I would have liked Shirley herself. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that she was a big fan of baseball. For no other reason, this could have made us friends.
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A fascinating and well-researched study of a complicated and compelling author. I haven't read Jackson's work in decades but this inspired me to dive deeper into it. Her fascination with the occult, tarot, witchcraft permeates her work. Her difficult relationship with her mother is heartbreaking. And her relationship with her unfaithful husband really colors her work. Definitely recommend the audio book and also a further exploration of her books and stories. ( )

66. Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin
reader: Bernadette Dunne
published: 2016
format: 19:25 audible audiobook (608 pages in hardcover)
acquired: November 24
listened: Nov 24 – Dec 30
rating: 3
locations: San Francisco, New York, New Hampshire, Vermont
about the author: An American literary critic, former editor at The New Republic and an Adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

Shirley Jackson was fascinating and led a much too short but very crazy life, raising four kids and supporting the family with her income from publishing stories, parenting memoirs, and deeply complex novels. Her husband, Stanley Hyman, a professional critic, was as much a complication as a support. A free thinker, atheist, with Communist leanings, he was also a proponent of free love, spending college chasing other women, and telling Shirley about it. Then, when older, overweight, notably unattractive, and teaching at an all-women's college, he continued to search for other women (although apparently not on campus). He was also the first to discover Shirley, claiming, based off a Syracuse University newspaper short story, that he would marry that author. He was ultimately her best critic, and a decent posthumous promoter, for the few years he outlived her. Shirley Jackson, also overweight and with underdiagnosed health problems, died in 1965, age 48. Her youngest son was 13. Stanly died in 1970, he was 51.

One of the nice things that comes out of this biography is Jackson's development of her themes. All her work has underlying themes of fear and anxiety, and much of it touches on multiple personalities - things Jackson herself was dealing with in real life (albeit she was not schizophrenic). In a diary she wrote,

"I am writing about ambivalence but it is an ambivalence of the spirit, or the mind, not the sex...It is not a he or a she but the demon in the mind, and that demon finds guilts where it can and uses them and runs mad with laughing when it triumphs; it is the demon which is fear...We are afraid of being someone else and doing the things someone else wants us to do and of being taken and of being used by someone else, some other guilt-ridden conscience that lives on and on in our minds, something we build ourselves and never recognize, but this is fear, not a named sin. Then it is fear itself, fear of self that I am writing about...fear and guilt and their destruction of identity. Why am I so afraid?"

The writing process, at least with novels where she would continually rework them, would actually drive her to limits of sanity...but not judgment. As she developed, she ignored Stanley's criticism more and more, so he complained she listened to her daughter's criticism more than him, a professional critic (while she was writing [We Always Lived in the Castle]). Another cool thing was to see what kind of parent she was. Left to do all the parenting on her own, she was overwhelmed and yet a sincerely warm loving parent. (no Pearl Tull).

This biography is thorough, maybe too thorough. It's all here and covers about everything we know about her. It's not a perfect biography, but I'm really grateful to have listened to it.

2021
https://www.librarything.com/topic/333774#7697317 ( )

Finally finished this, after a couple of library holds expired while I was in the middle. It was good but not gripping—she was an interesting character, and I'm always game for reading about that mid-century literary milieu, because I think of it as my parents' (at least in terms of cultural influences), even though they were 10 years younger than Jackson and her husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman. Jackson and Hyman also wrote for The New Leader, where I worked for a few years in its last days in the early 2000s. Hyman's intellectual mansplaininess was grating, and I'm not sure I ever got the chemistry between them, but I don't doubt it existed. I sympathized with Jackson's balancing act between the expectations of being a 1950s/'60s mother and housewife and a novelist, but I didn't quite feel it... then again Ruth Franklin's documenting Jackson's story from her correspondence and journals—to which Jackson added her own spin—and other people's accounts, so that takes away a bit of the immediacy. So: interesting but not a must-read, unless you're a Jackson fanatic (I'm not). ( )