A couple of days ago, I learned that one of Shirley Jackson's homes in North Bennington, Vermont is now a bakery, Moon Scones. It is not the house I walked by during my personal Shirley Jackson Bennington Tour back in 2015. If only I'd known this second house existed when I was there!
Now there is a business in Jackson's second home, the bakery I just mentioned. I could make another trip to the Bennington area and actually get inside this house, the one Kathye Fetsko Petrie says Jackson bought with money from her writing.
However, it's a bakery, and I don't eat gluten.
Here's something to mull over--Fetsko Petrie says Jackson bought the Moon Scones house with money she made writing Life Among the Savages, one of her mom memoirish books, not the books she is famous for now. Is Netflix ever going to turn Life Among the Savages into a series the way it did The Haunting of Hill House? Probably not.
But maybe it should.
I always think of Jackson's writing as more Life Among the Savages. In the 1980s, the Cincinnati Public Library had a lot of 1950s memoirs in the closed stacks, and I would pick up one or two on my way home from work every day! I'd love to see a film adaptation, but not of Hill House. Too creepy!
ReplyDeleteI've read traditional short stories Jackson wrote, too, that I think really shed some light on women in mid-twentieth century.
ReplyDeleteIn either Life Among the Savages or Raising Demons, Jackson writes about being admitted to the hospital for the delivery of one of her children. The clerk is filling out a form with her and asks what she does. She says, "Writer." The clerk says, "I'll put down housewife."
I spent a big chunk of my life as a housewife, though I'd probably say "homemaker" these days and have great respect for the historical impact of women's work within the home. And still I find that exchange chilling.