Delivery dates of two kinds, "The Third Baby's the Easiest," etc.

Updates from the Shirley Jackson files, #7

Dear friends,

I've been remiss in keeping you updated for a number of reasons, the most relevant of which is that I spent the last few months fixated on a single goal: turning in the revisions on my manuscript by the end of October. I'm happy to tell you that I made it and the book is on track for publication next September, just ahead of Shirley Jackson's centenary, which falls on December 14, 2016. My editor, Bob Weil of Norton/Liveright, is truly extraordinary—I don't think a single page of the manuscript escaped his black pen. It's rarer than ever to find an editor who gives his books such a thorough working-over, and I'm deeply grateful for his careful reading.

In addition to the hard-and-fast date of Jackson's centenary, a personal deadline loomed as well: the arrival of my third child, whose due date was supposed to be November 4. As it happened, she arrived a little early, on October 27—the day after I turned in the book. How cooperative of her to wait! 

"You're turning into Shirley Jackson!" a friend exclaimed when I told him of my pregnancy. Well, Jackson had four children, and I'm in no hurry to rise to that challenge. But she wrote a wonderful magazine piece about the delivery of her third that I've thought of often in the last few weeks. Originally called "The Third Baby's the Easiest" and later incorporated into Life Among the Savages, it describes Jackson arriving at the hospital to give birth and being asked by the clerk what her profession is. "Writer," she says. "I'll just put down housewife," the clerk tells her.

Reading those lines for the first time—some five years ago now—was what made me realize I wanted to write Jackson's biography. The anecdote perfectly encapsulates how great was the pressure on women of her era to assume without protest the "happy homemaker" role society urged upon them, and the tension between the two roles of housewife and writer animates so much of Jackson's writing. It's a tension that made her exquisitely representative of her time, but it's also a tension that many writers who are also mothers, myself heartily included, still feel today—despite (or perhaps because of) all the contemporary rhetoric about "opting out" versus "having it all."

Working on this book, there was a period when I took what I called a "method" approach: I cooked some of the recipes I found in Jackson's files, started drinking bourbon as she did, even tried a vial of the perfume she wore (Guerlain's Mitsouko). Now, it seems, I'll get to find out if the third baby is really the easiest! So far, she just might be—which this mother/writer will definitely appreciate during the crucial months leading up to pub date.

All best,

Ruth

"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream."—Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House