Life Among the Savages, by Shirley Jackson
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Life Among the Savages, by Shirley Jackson
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In a hilariously charming domestic memoir, America’s celebrated master of terror turns to a different kind of fright: raising childrenIn her celebrated fiction, Shirley Jackson explored the darkness lurking beneath the surface of small-town America. But in Life Among the Savages, she takes on the lighter side of small-town life. In this witty and warm memoir of her family’s life in rural Vermont, she delightfully exposes a domestic side in cheerful contrast to her quietly terrifying fiction. With a novelist’s gift for character, an unfailing maternal instinct, and her signature humor, Jackson turns everyday family experiences into brilliant adventures.
Life Among the Savages, by Shirley Jackson - Amazon Sales Rank: #247385 in Books
- Brand: Jackson, Shirley
- Published on: 2015-05-05
- Released on: 2015-05-05
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.77" h x .58" w x 5.06" l, 1.00 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 240 pages
Life Among the Savages, by Shirley Jackson Amazon.com Review Can this be the author of such chilling tales as The Lottery and The Haunting of Hill House? An ordinary housewife stuck in a big, shabby house with three marvelous, demanding children and a charming husband who takes detached interest in the chaos they generate? Yes, it's Shirley Jackson all right: the precision of her observations and prose is familiar, even if her humor is something of a surprise. Not until Anne Lamott's Operating Instructions in 1993 would another woman write with such honesty about the maddening multitude of trivial, essential chores that constitute a mother's life. But Jackson nailed it first, 40 years earlier, in her hilarious chronicle of life in a small Vermont town, where getting the kids to school on time requires the combined gifts of a drill sergeant and a lady's maid. The saga of her son's bumpy adjustment to kindergarten, frequently anthologized as Charles, is justly famous, but Jackson's account of the Department Store Trip from Hell (two kids, two toy guns, one doll carriage and doll, mayhem in revolving doors and escalators) is even funnier. Although her memoirs are as merciless as her ghost stories, you may not notice because you're laughing so hard. --Wendy Smith
From Library Journal Jackson, author of the famous The Haunting of Hill House and The Lottery, here leaves her spooks behind to offer this portrait of horror of another kind?life in the suburbs. This 1953 volume presents her take on living in an old house in Vermont. Good fun of the Erma Bombeck kind.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review “Read today, [Shirley Jackson’s] pieces feel surprisingly modern—mainly because Jackson refuses to sentimentalize or idealize motherhood…. [Jackson’s] household stories take advantage of the same techniques she developed as a fiction writer: the gradual buildup of carefully chosen detail, the ironic understatement, the repetition of key phrases and the unerring instinct for just where to begin and end a story.” -Ruth Franklin, New York Times Book Review "Charming…you’ll see every parenting stance you’ve ever adopted, every parent-story trope you’ve ever told or heard, expressed more perfectly than you ever could have…Reading Shirley Jackson, one of the great memoirists of family life, makes sharp those feelings once more—while reminding us that, yes, thank god and curse time, we too will one day look back on them across a gulf of years.”-Dan Kois, Slate "Many who profess an admiration for Shirley Jackson, often described as a 'writer's writer' do not usually include her thinly veiled memoirs of motherhood. But it is precisely these hilariously eviscerating, keenly observed, and genersou books that I and many other writers who happen to be mothers, adore.-Ayelet Waldman "As warm as it is hilarious and believable...Never has the state of domestic chaos been so perfectly illuminated." –New York Times Book Review"When it comes to just sheer honest, wry, frustrated, finding-ways-to-appreciate-it writing about family life, we all sit at Shirley Jackson’s feet"-New York Times Motherlode"Very funny… Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons are each a good place to begin for those who have never read any Shirley Jackson.”-The New Republic "Jackson artfully loves and portrays her children. She writes of their fast growth into formidable personalities with dismayed narration and lovely direct quotes, all charmingly subjective. Her view of their sayings and doings is certainly sophisticated but far from cynical or objective." –Saturday Review "A housewife-mother’s frustrations are transformed by a deft twist of the wrist into, not a grim account of disintegration and madness, still less the poisoning of her family, but light-hearted comedy." –Joyce Carol Oates "Jackson isn’t all eerie uncertainties and lonely housewives. Those who know her work only from 'The Lottery' or Hill House may be surprised to discover that she could also be very funny...Jackson’s two lighthearted memoirs, are filled with droll observations and amusing mishaps." –William Brennan, Slate
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42 of 42 people found the following review helpful. If tamed, LOL so high it could replace internal combustion.. By Allen Smalling ."Our house is old, noisy and full. When we moved into it we had two children and about five thousand books; when we finally overflow and move out again we will have perhaps twenty children and easily half a million books . . ."This is the beginning of the curiously powerful--and stealth-assault funny--LIFE AMONG THE SAVAGES (1952), memoirs of a Mommy, a Daddy, and a powerhouse-ful of children who give up post-World War II's overcrowded Manhattan housing market for roomier digs in a remote Vermont town. These are certainly life-with-kids family memoirs of the late 1940s and early 1950s, but to leave it at that would miss the point--like saying that Shirley Jackson's short story "The Lottery" is an anthropological study of a ritualistic New England town, or that THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN is a treatise on rafting the Mississippi River before the Civil War.The author of LIFE AMONG THE SAVAGES is, in fact, Shirley Jackson, and this is the first half of her two comic novels about life with small children. (The latter half being the later, and unfortunately more difficult to find RAISING DEMONS, published in 1957.) I'm not revealing too much to pass on that the hick town just happens to be Bennington, Vermont, the one with the all-female college; and that the harried Papa taught there. And when Mommy climbed into bed late at night "with a mystery" there's a good chance she was working on one of her own stories and a portable typewriter, a pack of cigarettes and a snifter of brandy climbed into bed with her.In LIFE AMONG THE SAVAGES, even the most please-don't-eat-the-daisies events usually hide a shiv or a shiver somewhere amidst the sitcom. When the financially strapped family scrapes up enough cash for some day help, they interview and hire an escaped felon; later they tangle with a motorcycle mama, the ultimate Effie Klinker of negative IQ, and an over-the-top fundamentalist who frosted her cookies with "Repent, Sinner." Not to mention: "From the girls' room, small voices rose in song, and I listened happily, thinking how pleasant it was," reminisces la Jackson. "[Just later] I was out of bed in one leap and racing down the hall. 'Baby ate a spider, Baby ate a spider,' was what they were singing."Maybe it's just the mixed blessings of heredity--and all those thousands of books--that the marriage of a college professor and a celebrated author would produce a growing family of kids so bright, inquisitive, creative, and, um, let's call it individualistic. "I frequently call [daughter Jannie] Anne and her father very often calls her Jean. Her brother calls her Honey, Sis, and Dopey, Sally calls her Nannnie, and she calls herself, variously, Jean, Jane, Anne, Linda, Barbara, Estelle, Josephine, Geraldine, Sarah, Sally, Laura, Margaret, Marilyn, Susan, and--imposingly--Mrs. Ellenoy. The second Mrs. Ellenoy. . . [M]y husband . . . is addressed in all variants of father from Pappy to Da, even--being a man not easily thrown off balance--Mr. Ellenoy." Son Laurie was so incensed by his temporary amnesia following his bicycle's crash with a car that he made the ambulance driver run HOME with the lights and siren on, "an extremely proud Jannie sitting beside him and traffic separating on either side."Was life fair to Shirley Jackson? Well, she did produce (and by this book's end) four radiant children, two boys and two girls, all spaced an even three years apart. And she hung her laundry in the basement to dry, just like her neighbors told her to, after the backyard clothes line had flung it indignantly to the ground several times. But the nurses at the hospital were SO cross at her for yelling when she was in deep labor with Sally. And she got blacklisted by the PTA when Jannie said there was a woman at the door who wanted a dollar and Shirley, upstairs painting, assumed it was just another of Jannie's invisible friends . . .Sadly, Shirley Jackson, person and author, later on became too dependent on chocolate, liquor, cigs and even amphetamines and did not live to see her fiftieth birthday. But while she was alive she gave us a treasury of suspense and horror fiction. Equally worth celebrating, I think, are LIFE AMONG THE SAVAGES and RAISING DEMONS. Funny as Hell, and occasionally funny like Hell. My lit-chat group ran into LIFE AMONG THE SAVAGES two years ago and despite initial misgivings based on its genre, unanimously loved it.
17 of 19 people found the following review helpful. Hilarious and refreshing By Elizabeth G. Melillo Shirley Jackson's wicked humour (don't miss the story of "Charles," for example) kept me laughing, and it was especially refreshing to step into a (let's face it, far more realistic) world where children could have a score of imaginary playmates (the family of Mrs Ellenoy), a son could be a bit of a discipline problem, the baby could eat a spider ... and no one ran to the self-help aisle or shrink just because kids were kids.I had assumed that this was a biographical work, with the adventures just a bit exagerrated, until I read Shirley's (excellent) biography "Private Demons." Somehow, the stories were not as funny when I came to know that some of them were fiction, merely based on the children's traits.This tale will never bore, and will give anyone a good dose of laughter. Perhaps those who now have children of the age which Shirley's were then will relax a bit realising that raising children was never a joy ride - but there is no need, today, to make it more difficult than it has to be.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful. A pox on everyday life! By L. L. Golden Ms. Jackson's domestic fiction is unfairly lumped into the category of housewife humor dominated by Bombeck, Viorst, Kerr and company. While these scribes should be awarded fair due, their prose generates from the perspective of "normal woman" experiencing "everyday life" in mid 20th century America. Life Among the Savages and its sequel are the wry observances of an extremely rare mind whose life is anything but mundane.Who else is asked to consider moving to a Vermont barn (Those stalls could be converted to bedrooms, suggests a Realtor) or a dwelling of petrified doughnuts when the NYC lease unexpectedly expires? Who else creates the criteria for an Olympic Event when faced with a live bat and a husband's air rifle? No one but Shirley quotes Shakespeare when facing a delivery room or charts her labor's progress by the newspaper her husband is (currently) hiding behind. No one gives her children the creative freedom to assume alternate identities while simultaneously herding them (with paraphernalia) through department store shopping. No one else is Shirley.Life may be a little off kilter where a woman prefers to rob her children instead of pushing her furnace's power button and a family's restless night (my favorite) results in the baby possessing brandy, the dog asleep on the pillow and a quilt that vanished in perpetuity but it is not routine and neither is this book. Miss Jackson's work, as a whole, has resisted the categorization of literary critics. This book deserves no less. Enjoy the wry, detached tone of the narrator especially when a faint note of hysteria is detected in the narrative. Realize you have incorporated the sayings of her children into your family lexicon and give her the proper credit. But never label her domestic work as anything less than another branch of prose mastered by a gifted writer. If you do, I won't be responsible for the consequences.
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