Let Me Tell You Read Free

laundry when it comes back, the wash on the line fresh from the tubs….Women with homes live so closely with substances, bread, soap, and buttons.”
    Jackson, too, considered herself at least a part-time housewife, and the life of a house—what is required to make and keep a home, and what it means when a home is destroyed—is important in just about all of her novels. (“I love houses” is the opening line of “The Ghosts of Loiret,” a humorous take on Jackson’s real-life search for a haunted house she could use as a model for Hill House.) But the organized linen closet was more a fantasy than a standard she strived to uphold. More often than not, housekeeping done too perfectly in a Jackson story is a sign that something is wrong. In “Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons,” it is the disagreeable Mrs. Spencer whose kitchen is “immaculate, dinner preparing invisibly”; the bustling hospitality of the unconventional Oberons, which Mrs. Spencer cannot appreciate, signals comfort and cheer. As the nonfiction collected here demonstrates, Jackson made no pretense of being a flawless housekeeper, “trim and competent”; unlike her neighbors, she inevitably found herself as she does in “Here I Am, Washing Dishes Again”—with the dishpan heaped high, inventing stories to carry her through the task. Close readers of “The Lottery”—Jackson’s tale of a ritual stoning carried out in an ordinary village, which was written around the same time as that essay—will remember that one of the main characters arrives late to the village square because she was finishing her dishes. Another echo of “The Lottery,” and its warning about the dangers of conformity, appears in the unlikely setting of “Mother, Honestly!,” a humor piece about raising a pre-teenager. In Jackson’s hands, the classic adolescent complaint—“Everyone else is allowed to”—becomes an alarming sign of groupthink: Even to write the phrase “everyone else,” she confesses, gives her “a little chill.”
    A highlight of this collection, especially for aspiring writers, is the craft lectures, in which Jackson, via anecdotes and analyses of her own work, shares succinct, specific advice about creating fiction. Her diversity of themes notwithstanding, Jackson’s style remained consistent from her earliest stories to her late novels. One of its hallmarks is her uncanny ability to seize the telling detail—what she calls, in the lecture “Garlic in Fiction,” the accent that when used “sparingly and with great care” gives a little extra emphasis to certain moments in a story. In “The Arabian Nights,” the way a couple pick up and set down their cocktail glasses tells us everything we need to know about their marriage; in “Paranoia,” the light-colored hat worn by the man following Mr. Beresford takes on its own malevolent power. Jackson explains that she generated credibility for Eleanor, the protagonist in
Hill House,
by carefully layering symbols—the cottage with the white cat on the step, the little girl who insists on drinking out of a cup painted with stars—to ease the transition from “the sensible environment of the city to the somewhat less believable atmosphere of the haunted house.” (“This was hard,” she admits.) In “Memory and Delusion,” she emphasizes that the writer’s intelligence must be constantly alert: “I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at your desk and pick up your pen and finish writing when you put down your pen again; a writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing.” For the writer, “all things are potential paragraphs,” but their emotional valence remains to be determined. When a green porcelain bowl on the piano suddenly shatters during a bridge game, Jackson keeps the image of the scattered pieces in her memory storeroom,