“Read today, [Shirley Jackson’s] pieces feel surprisingly modern—mainly because Jackson refuses to sentimentalize or idealize motherhood…. [Jackson’s] household stories take advantage of the same techniques she developed as a fiction writer: the gradual buildup of carefully chosen detail, the ironic understatement, the repetition of key phrases and the unerring instinct for just where to begin and end a story.”
-Ruth Franklin, New York Times Book Review
“Charming…you’ll see every parenting stance you’ve ever adopted, every parent-story trope you’ve ever told or heard, expressed more perfectly than you ever could have…Reading Shirley Jackson, one of the great memoirists of family life, makes sharp those feelings once more—while reminding us that, yes, thank god and curse time, we too will one day look back on them across a gulf of years.”
-Dan Kois, Slate
“When it comes to just sheer honest, wry, frustrated, finding-ways-to-appreciate-it writing about family life, we all sit at Shirley Jackson’s feet”
–New York Times Motherlode
“Hilarious, subversive, sharp without being legal, and loving without an ounce of sentiment, Shirley Jackson’s more-or-less autobiographical account of life as a mother of four and faculty wife (and brilliant writer) is an eternal, comic joy.”
-Amy Bloom
“A housewife-mother’s frustrations are transformed by a deft twist of the wrist into, not a grim account of disintegration and madness, still less the poisoning of her family, but light-hearted comedy.”
–Joyce Carol Oates
“Very funny… Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons are each a good place to begin for those who have never read any Shirley Jackson.”
–The New Republic
“Jackson isn’t all eerie uncertainties and lonely housewives. Those who know her work only from “The Lottery” or Hill House may be surprised to discover that she could also be very funny…Jackson’s two lighthearted memoirs, are filled with droll observations and amusing mishaps.”
–William Brennan, Slate
“Consistently delightful.”
-San Francisco Chronicle
“A very pleasant form of pandemonium and hugely entertaining.”
-Kirkus
