, I didn’t really pay a lot of attention. LJH: When I was a teenager, I was embarrassed by the stories about us kids. SE: You write in the book’s introduction that she would often run story ideas by you and your siblings. I mean, here we are, 56 years after she’s died, talking about her work as though it was written last week. She never dreamed it had the kind of legs it has. I think she would like what’s going on with The Haunting of Hill House.
Letters my mother never read book movie#
But I think she would have liked very much the movie we did of We Have Always Lived in the Castle. I think she would have disliked the movie Shirley.
I don’t know how she would feel about all of this. I don’t allow any adaptations that are not at least intending to be reasonably faithful. LJH: She writes in her letters that she takes the opinion that if they pay the money, they can do what they want with it. How do you think she would have felt about these newer versions, especially The Haunting of Hill House, which was so wildly different from the book? SE: Your mother never seemed to approve of adaptations of her work. I saw the film at Sundance, and I went up to Elisabeth at the cast party and said, “Hi, Mom!” I told her who I was, and she threw her arms around me and said, “Oh, my God!”. Now, it also created a very incorrect impression of her, which I don’t like. While it didn’t portray the real Shirley, it did introduce a lot of people to Shirley Jackson, who never knew who she was or had heard the name and didn’t know anything. But others, especially her earlier novels, are eerily prescient, like The Sundial and Hangsaman, and The Bird’s Nest, which is a timeless story.Īnd then, of course, the Elisabeth Moss movie Shirley. Some of the books are timeless, like We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Haunting of Hill House. LJH: Well, I think she’s relevant, increasingly so now. Why do you think it is that there’s a renewed interest in her work? There are Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House, the film version of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and the film Shirley, starring Elisabeth Moss. SE: There has been a lot of Shirley Jackson-related content in recent years. I guess I finally just got to the letters. So, we Just an Ordinary Day, and we did Let Me Tell You five years ago. Once we discovered there was such a large amount of unpublished good fiction, that had to come first. Stories that were in progress, stories she didn’t like well enough to submit. There’s so much Shirley Jackson writing around, much of it not published. I’ve assumed they would be published someday, there were so many other things to do first. Was there a particular reason you chose to publish these letters now? SANDRA EBEJER: It’s been 56 years since your mother’s passing. Shondaland recently spoke with Hyman about his mother’s legacy, the recent renewed interest in her work, and what it was like to grow up surrounded by cultural icons.
He refers to the collection as his mother’s autobiography and says, “I really tried to just stay out of the way and let Shirley talk.” (To one angry reader, Jackson responded with a single line: “If you don’t like my peaches, don’t shake my tree.”) The book was edited by Jackson’s eldest son, Laurence Jackson Hyman, who combed through more than 500 of his mother’s letters to select the 300 included in the book. It is a fascinating, and very, very funny, read. The Letters of Shirley Jackson is a collection of missives Jackson wrote to her parents, husband, agents, friends, children, and even fans, and provides an intimate look into her personal and writing life. In addition to her well-known tales of ghosts and haunted houses, she penned witty slice-of-life stories about motherhood, marriage, and housework, many of which were published in women’s magazines such as Good Housekeeping, Vogue, and Ladies’ Home Journal. At the time of her death, she had published six novels, two family chronicles, and hundreds of short stories and essays. As detailed in the new book The Letters of Shirley Jackson, she wrote nearly every day, right up to her death in 1965 at age 48. However, Jackson was an extraordinarily prolific writer whose talents were not limited to one genre. Though it was not her first published work, “The Lottery” garnered Jackson significant national attention and, along with her most famous novel, 1959’s The Haunting of Hill House, would forever associate her name with gothic horror. But upon its initial publication in 1948, Jackson’s tale -about a village that uses an annual lottery to select one of its own to sacrifice - was considered so shocking that its publisher, The New Yorker, received torrents of angry mail from readers demanding cancellations of their subscriptions. Odds are your first introduction to author Shirley Jackson was through her short story “ The Lottery,” which has become a staple of high school literature classes.
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