Shirley
Page 23
Acknowledgments
My interest in Shirley Jackson has an arc all its own. I first read We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Haunting of Hill House when I was around thirteen, the age when I also discovered Baroness Orczy and Judith Rossner and Daphne du Maurier and Iris Murdoch—like Jackson, women writers whose female characters managed to be both part of and resistant to what can only be called “normal” life. But I had never considered Shirley Jackson from a writerly point of view until I had the good fortune to meet the novelist Rachel Pastan in 2007 at the Bennington Writing Seminars. It was Rachel who encouraged me to examine Jackson’s gift for mixing the mundane and the fantastic. For that, and for her patient, intelligent readings of this novel through many iterations, I will always be indebted.
This book has had so many friends. Thank you to readers Dinah Lenney, Renée Shafransky, Maggie Merrell, Lou Ann Walker, Martha Cooley, Ellen Prentiss Campbell, Melanie Fleishman, Joe Stracci, Ian Williams, Ann Fitzsimmons, Julie Sheehan, Jennifer Pike, Jake Merrell, Martha Samuelson, and Herb and Maggie Scarf. Thank you to Bob Reeves and everyone else at Stony Brook Southampton’s MFA in Creative Writing & Literature; Jed Turner, Antonio Romani, Ann Brandon; the Library of Congress, particularly Dan DeSimone and Carolyn Sung; Benjamin Dreyer, Cathy Creedon, and Jackson biographer Judy Oppenheimer. At Bennington, particular thanks to Sven Birkerts, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Alice Mattison, and Joe Tucker at Crossett Library.
Unlimited gratitude goes to the three people whose belief in this book has been a game changer: Henry Dunow, Sarah Hochman, and Jim Merrell.
Last but far from least, I must acknowledge Shirley Jackson and Stanley Edgar Hyman. I have conflated their residential history, and restructured facts and details to serve the purpose of my story, much as Shirley did with the story of Paula Welden or that of the two young schoolteachers who visited Versailles. My hope is that Shirley and Stanley would be amused by this fictional exercise.
About the Author
SUSAN SCARF MERRELL is the author of a previous novel, A Member of the Family, and a nonfiction work, The Accidental Bond: How Sibling Connections Influence Adult Relationships. She is a professor in the MFA in Creative Writing & Literature program at Stony Brook Southampton, and is fiction editor of TSR: The Southampton Review.