Life with children

There is a passage in Life among the Savages (1953) where Shirley Jackson is asked her occupation. After she repeatedly says "writer," the person asking the question puts down "housewife." That she was both is illustrated in this, one of two amusing books she wrote about her family.

Her fiction consisted mostly of horror stories and ghost stories, and the titles of her family memoirs reflect a similar theme. The other is Raising Demons.

Her children — she gives birth to her third child early in Life among the Savages and a fourth at the end — actually seem typical, especially for the period she writes about. They are rambunctious, imaginative, ornery, sweet and so on, just like the kids in every other family. What's different is Jackson's ability to make the incidents in a typical family's life worth reading about.

She writes about finding a house big enough and affordable enough for her family, about learning to drive (her husband has no interest in driving), about a daughter's imaginary friends, about a son's imaginary and trouble-making classmate, about what happens when everyone in the house is sick at the same time, about the impossibility of finding a reliable housemaid, about trying to go shopping with three children in tow and so forth.

Many of these incidents were excerpted in magazines like Good Housekeeping and Collier's at the time. and deservedly so. Even 75 years later they bring chuckles. For those of us who grew up in the 1950s, they bring memories.