#puts a whole new gloss on Haunting of Hill House wow

[queenlua]

holy heck i had no idea Shirley Jackson’s husband was such a piece of shit

Jackson’s husband, Stanley Hyman, was on her side in the beginning. A critic and academic with a wide circle of friends, he helped make their household a place of lively intellectual exchange (along with the heavy drinking that was common in those years). But he became jealous when his successes didn’t equal hers, and at home he was both tyrannical and useless: she cared for the children and did the cooking, at times with paid help, while he never ventured far enough into the kitchen even to make coffee. He was also a sexual harasser—one family friend he came onto her like a “steamroller”—who had affairs and made a point of letting her know. Shirley didn’t want an openn marriage and had no desire to suffer for love, but she didn’t feel strong enough to stand her ground against him. Instead she wrote him distressed letters she didn’t send and had breakdowns in which she gave in to despair and self-loathing. She flet so unsupported that at times she feared insanity.

One way Shirley coped with these psychic assaults was by turning them into comedy. In her bestselling chronicle of raising children, Life Among the Savages, she describes going into labor, a physical event that demands concentration and concern for the self, while her husband and children expect her to go on caring for them. In her account of trying to cook breakfast, then going alone to the hospital by taxi (Stanley couldn’t drive), she plays her abandonment for painful laughs.