“Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life” by Ruth Franklin: “Jackson, who embraced ‘that compound of creatures I call Me’…kept multiple diaries simultaneously”

“As a sickly, isolated child growing up in a strict New England family, Hawthorne is said to have developed an unusual quirk: he composed an inner dialogue, divided into two personalities, that substituted for conversation and companionship. One side served as a storyteller, the other as audience, offering questions or criticisms. As a teenager, Jackson did something similar, but on the page. She kept multiple diaries simultaneously, each with a different purpose” (1, p. 36).

“She had always been moody, as nearly all teenagers are. Now, in an extension of the persona splitting of her multiple diaries, she took the unusual step of assigning names to her moods, as if they were characters in a play. The habit continued through her college years and later manifested in her fiction—most strikingly in The Bird’s Nest, her novel of multiple-personality disorder, in which a woman’s mind fractures into four distinct characters, each with her own name and defining characteristics” (1, p. 50).

“The demon in the mind. This was Jackson’s obsession, perhaps her fundamental obsession, throughout her life” (1, p. 63).

“On her last day at the University of Rochester—June 8, 1936—Jackson wrote herself a letter, addressed to ‘Shirlee’ and signed ‘Lee’: the name of a new persona” (1, p. 68).

“Soon after she began writing The Bird’s Nest, in late 1952 or early 1953, Jackson…began to suffer from headaches that often came on very suddenly…She began to lose her memory: first just a slight absentmindedness, then forgetting entire conversations…” (1, pp. 344-346). (Search “headaches,” “absent-minded,” “absentmindedness,” and “memory gaps” in this blog.)

“Then there was the question of multiple personality: what it meant…to Jackson in particular—Jackson, who embraced ‘that compound of creatures I call Me’; who teased interviewers by playing up either her housewife persona or her witchy tendencies, but always kept the writer under wraps, hidden from view” (1, p. 351).

1. Ruth Franklin. Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life. New York, Liveright Publishing/WW Norton, 2016.