Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays and Other Writings
Shirley Jackson
Random House
Shirley Jackson’s best-known works betray the horrors of seemingly safe spaces: family homes, small town communities, our own dear familiar minds. The stories and essays collected here (written between 1940 and 1965) burrow ever deeper into enclosed domestic territories. In cheerier pieces, these hold ritual joys and uncanny surprises, crackling with supernatural energy and with Jackson’s extraordinary ability to animate the mundanities of daily life. The house of her autobiographical reflections makes itself cosily strange by materialising unsolicited pumpkin pies and hosting the squabbles of her personified kitchen gadgets. Firmly on the side of childish imagination, Jackson writes engagingly of her children’s subversive energy (and that of Dr. Seuss).
Yet if home can be the sacred domain of women, children and trickster ghosts, Jackson also exposes the brittle fault lines of domestic life. A series of wartime stories show returning soldiers encroaching dangerously on their wives’ newfound autonomy. In ‘Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons’, family norms are infused with a manic paranoia around ‘vulgar’ neighbours. And older children often become monstrous: the protagonist of ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ terrorises her lonely neighbour, while ‘Let Me Tell You’ sees wealthy teenagers cruelly toy with ‘the riffraff’. As ever, Jackson’s finest achievement is in carefully, unfussily dismantling distinctions between public and private; domestic and wild. Perhaps this is best expressed by her children in their afterword. For them, this collection reflects ‘both the mother we knew and an unpredictable stranger’.
Words: Gill Moore
