Shirley Jackson’s Motivating Motherhood
Is motherhood’s mundanity exactly what I need?
When I was younger, just a few years into an unhappy first career as an attorney, I read an article by New York Magazine’s Dear Polly writer (a woman named Heather Havrilesky, who has just this week announced that she’ll be leaving the position after a long, successful tenure) entitled “Want to Be Better at Your Job? Have a Kid.” I remember posting the link to my Facebook page, along with a paragraph about how wrong I thought she was, my mind a flurry of self-righteous resentment in the way it often was during those years, at the height of the “Can Women Really Have It All?” debate.
The gist of Havrilesky’s argument, found in the final paragraph of her short piece, was this:
“Kids . . . force you to decide what’s worth your time and what isn’t. Kids force you to focus on the things you love . . . and invest in those things with all of your heart. . . . Kids teach you how to enjoy your time, in other words . . . by squeezing your free time down to nothing.”
As you might expect, Havrilesky’s own life exemplified her message: after she had her first child, she published a memoir; several years after that, she published a collection of her advice columns, and later a collection of essays. Her career trajectory did, in fact, appear to track her motherhood. Today, Havrilesky’s children are mostly grown, and her tenure at New York, completed while raising them, has been so successful that she now has the freedom to strike out on her own. It seems, after all, that what she wrote was true: her babies made her more focused, more ambitious, more aware of the rapid passing of time. As she wrote:
“The clock was ticking down . . . I only had a few hours a day to be brilliant; I had to make those hours count. . . . I had to pour my soul into it, or else. I was bloated and unshowered and flinty, but creatively, I was on fire.”
Now that I’m in my thirties, settled down with a partner and more fulfilled in my career, I’m afraid to admit to my younger self that I can see what Havrilesky meant: I lost a lot of time in my twenties to existential panic, to procrastination and uncertainty, to what she describes as “eat[ing] yourself alive using only your own brain.” And while some of the malaise has waned, I’m ashamed to admit that I still spend a lot of time procrastinating.
So I do wonder: would having babies motivate me in exactly this way? Would it supercharge my focus and force me to finish my book?
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If there’s a single American woman writer whose life offers proof that the answer is “yes,” it’s Shirley Jackson. Most famous for her short story The Lottery, which a lot of us may have read in middle school, Jackson was also the author of six novels, dozens more short stories, and two memoirs about her family life, entitled Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons.
The memoirs are where I found her first. While I had read The Lottery in school, it was only when I discovered Life Among the Savages in my late twenties that I began to find Jackson fascinating. She was, in many ways, one of my early writing influences: to discover that a writer could be famous for her nonfiction was, to me, a revelation. I had always wanted to write memoir or personal essay, and I liked the idea that a novelist could also be a life-writer. To write an entire book about one’s private world is what I wanted to do, and before I read Shirley Jackson, I hadn’t truly realized it was possible.
She speaks not just of caretaking but of labor: the mind-numbing, repetitive, physically demanding labor involved in keeping up a home.
Thanks to the 2016 publication of a new biography, Jackson has lately seen a bit of a renaissance. Some of her work has been reissued, a film loosely based on her life has been released, and previously unpublished or unfinished stories, essays, and lectures have been collected into a new book.
In the lectures especially, Jackson paints a portrait of her writing life that seems to track Havrilesky’s advice. She says:
“I am a writer who, due to a series of innocent and ignorant faults of judgment, finds herself with a family of four children and a husband, an eighteen-room house and no help, two Great Danes and four cats, and—if he has survived this long—a hamster. . . what this means is that I have at most a few hours a day to spend at the typewriter.”
Jackson’s description of her writing life reflects Havrilesky’s—she had limited time to write, and so she had to make it count. But it was also more than that. As the lecture goes on, Jackson’s warm depiction of the chaos of domestic life begins to take on an edge. She speaks not just of caretaking but of labor: the mind-numbing, repetitive, physically demanding labor involved in keeping up a home:
“All the time that I am making beds and doing dishes and driving to town for dancing shoes, I am telling myself stories. Stories about anything, anything at all. Just stories. After all, who can vacuum a room and concentrate on it?”
The toll of such labor is not to be underestimated: Jackson died in 1965 of heart failure at the stunningly young age of 48. While it would of course be specious to speculate about the contributing factors, it’s hard not to read her words—about the work, the lack of sleep, the way in which her husband, a philandering literary critic famous at the time but now mostly forgotten, never helped at all—and not wonder.
What might she have made if she weren’t so overburdened? What might she have written if she’d had more than those “few hours a day”?
Ruth Franklin, author of the biography Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, frames Jackson’s motherhood as pivotal to her success. In an article excerpted from the book, she writes:
“Jackson could not come into her own as a writer before she had children. She would not have been the writer she became without them.”
According to Franklin, Jackson is but one exemplar in a pattern perhaps innately characteristic of the writer mother—the same pattern pointed at by Havrilesky, despite the women’s writing lives being separated by half a century. It’s a pattern to do with the forced productivity of motherhood, with the way in which its limitations become freeing, or goading. As Franklin puts it,
“[M]any writers, especially women writers, learn to derive imaginative energy from their constraints.”
The cynic in me sees in this almost an essentialism. Women, made to have babies, do well with babies, even (or perhaps especially?) when it comes to art. And even when artificially reduced, in the way I just have done, to its most repugnant form, there’s something seductive about this idea—its expansiveness, its subtle suggestion that women can be uniquely great artists because they are mothers, and not separate and apart from it.
Not, in other words, in spite of it.
But, I can’t help but ask myself, what if it is in spite of it? What if Shirley Jackson was a great artist just because she was a great artist; what if motherhood was entirely beside the point? What if this pattern is nothing more than retroactive justification, a convenient narrative by which mothers (and the societies who depend upon their unpaid labor) support the decision they cannot undo?