Life Among the Savages

About this book

Shirley Jackson author of the classic short story The Lottery was known for her terse haunting prose. But the writer possessed another side one which is delightfully exposed in this hilariously charming memoir of her familys life in rural Vermont. Fans of Please Dont Eat the Daisies Cheaper by the Dozen and anything Erma Bombeck ever wrote will find much to recognize in Shirley Jacksons home and neighborhood: children who wont behave cars that wont start furnaces that break down a pugnacious corner bully household help that never stays and a patient capable husband who remains lovingly oblivious to the many thousands of things mothers and wives accomplish every single day. "Our house " writes Jackson "is old noisy and full. When we moved into it we had two children and about five thousand books; I expect that when we finally overflow and move out again we will have perhaps twenty children and easily half a million books." Jacksons literary talents are in evidence everywhere as is her trenchant unsentimental wit. Yet there is no mistaking the happiness and love in these pages which are crowded with the raucous voices of an extraordinary family living a wonderfully ordinary life. Continuously in print since 1948 Jacksons Haunting of Hill House has been bought by Dreamworks.