Shirley Jackson's birthday, Meg Wolitzer, and more
Dear friends,
You might know already that today is Shirley Jackson's birthday--she would have been 102. I always enjoy seeing who chooses to mark it on social media. Megan Abbott, probably my favorite contemporary crime writer--I profiled her earlier this year--tweeted a photo of the young Shirley along with one of her trademark lines: "As long as you write it away regularly nothing can really hurt you." (It comes from one of the lectures on writing she used to give at writers' festivals--oh, to time-travel back to one of those!) Was it true for her? I suspect she recognized that it was aspirational even as she was saying it.
In honor of the Queen's birthday, tonight would be a good time to start your binge of The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix, if you haven't gotten to it yet. Yesterday a friend and I agreed that despite its love-it-or-hate-it ending, the series is still well worth watching. This piece helpfully rounds up many of the "Easter eggs" from the book (they're not that hard to find). Jane Hu and Phil Maciak go deep in the LARB ("My cup of stars spilleth over," Hu writes). In The New Yorker, Emily Nussbaum dissents. Side note on Nussbaum: she is one of those critics--another is Daniel Mendelssohn--whom I admire greatly but almost never agree with. And in Buzzfeed, Sadie Graham brilliantly unpacks some of the complicated references to queerness in Jackson's original novel. Finally, in case you missed them, my recaps are at Vulture. That really was my dream assignment.
In other news, earlier this week I did an interview with Meg Wolitzer at the swank National Arts Club in Gramercy Park. I'm embarrassed to admit I didn't start reading Wolitzer until five years ago, when she came out with The Interestings, a rich, dense, gorgeous novel about, among other things, keeping up with your summer-camp friends into adulthood. (She gets the cult-like atmosphere of summer camps--I say this as someone who was absolutely devoted to my camp--exactly right.) We were discussing her latest novel, The Female Persuasion, which anticipates the #MeToo movement while taking a hard, critical look at second-wave feminism--its successes and its failures. But my favorite of her books is The Wife (now a movie starring Glenn Close), a tight, satirical take on the 1950s/60s generation of male writers. Wolitzer is "every bit as literary as Franzen or Eugenides," a writer for Entertainment Weekly said of her when The Interestings appeared. So why isn't she usually mentioned in the same breath with them? Hmm, I have no idea.
I'm always curious about writers' processes, so I was eager to ask Wolitzer how she goes about writing her novels. She told me she tends to start with an idea and allow a character or a story to coalesce around it. She'll write 80 or so pages without planning, then take a step back to look at what she's done before proceeding more strategically. Since I'm the kind of writer who thinks on the page, rather than by outlining, I was heartened that this works for her.
One last link. A few years ago I referred here to one of the creepiest real-estate stories ever: A family had bought a luxurious house in suburban New Jersey, only to receive threatening notes by someone calling themselves "The Watcher." Reeves Wideman finally got the whole story. Let's just say it's Shirley Jackson-worthy--especially the ending.
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