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Life Among the Savages

  • Book
  • 1953
  • #Biography
Shirley Jackson
@ShirleyJackson
(Author)
www.goodreads.com
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3.99/5 5.2k ratings
1 Recommender
1 Mention
1 Collection
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 i... Show More

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 family's life in rural Vermont. Fans of Please Don't Eat the Daisies, Cheaper by the Dozen, and anything Erma Bombeck ever wrote will find much to recognize in Shirley Jackson's home and neighborhood: children who won't behave, cars that won't 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." Jackson's 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.

(From Goodreads)

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Number of Pages: 256

ISBN: 0140267670

ISBN-13: 9780140267679

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Austin Kleon @austinkleon
  • Curated in 20 great books I read in 2020
I’d read both of Shirley Jackson’s most famous novels, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, but I was not ready for how much I loved her book about motherhood, Life Among The Savages. It was so funny I would stop and read excerpts out loud to my wife until she read it, too. The writers who gave me the most comfort in early quarantine were women grappling with art and domesticity — May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude, Eleanor Coppola’s Notes on a Life, and Anne Truitt’s Daybook — but none of their books made me laugh.
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