I take deep breaths, regulating my heartbeat after my child has a tantrum. I can stay calm until naptime when I will sit down to write or curl up to read. The ceiling has water damage, despite three roofers failing to find a leak. Miller Moths keep appearing in the bathroom, taking a break from their annual migration just to swoop at my face. When I write, I often focus on moments of wonder and discovery, but in the chaos of these days when my toddler barely sleeps and the house feels littered with unfortunate surprises, my dark side craves a scotch and about six hours alone. I dream of writing. I dreamed of this child. While balancing the two, my collection of Shirley Jackson books calls to me from the shelf in my workspace.

When I first purchased a volume containing Jackson’s collected short stories, The Haunting of Hill House, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle from the Teen People Book Club twenty years ago, her prose drew me in. The curious first line of The Haunting of Hill House sticks in the back of my mind. Jackson writes, “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.” This tension between reality and dreaming recurs throughout her work.

Shirley Jackson had a unique talent for highlighting the sinister and discordant in mundane settings and people. Thanks to Mike Flanagan’s loose adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House for Netflix, Jackson’s horror novels reached a new wave of popularity. Much of her writing, however, was not in that genre. In Life Among the Savages (1953)and Raising Demons (1957), Jackson collected humorous, sometimes biting stories about her domestic life, raising four children in an old house often in need of repair. Her trademark wry wit and observational precision practiced in these stories, as well as Jackson’s keen knowledge of the underlying tensions of domestic life, make Hill House all the scarier.

In her lecture “Experience and Fiction” collected in Come Along With Me, Jackson explains that fiction must stem from experience, but it does not always have to do so literally. Although she did extensive research on ghost stories while writing The Haunting of Hill House, she clarifies: “I wanted to write a book about ghosts, but I was perfectly prepared—I cannot emphasize it too strongly—I was perfectly prepared to keep those ghosts wholly imaginary.” Yet, she explains that when writing about life, fiction provides a release from the mundane: “It is much easier, I find, to write a story than to cope competently with the millions of daily trials and irritations that turn up in an ordinary house, and it helps a good deal—particularly with children around—if you can see them through a flattering veil of fiction.” Writing fiction was her means of dreaming so that she could exist sanely in reality, just not in absolute reality. Mothering small children can fray the nerves as well as a ghost can.

In opening Hill House, Jackson implies that our dreams help keep us living organisms sane under the burden of real life, but much of the novel blurs the line between reality and dreaming, sanity and insanity. In the novel, an investigator of the supernatural—Dr. John Montague—sets out to study the paranormal and its impact on individuals at Hill House, a mansion with a gruesome history. Hosted by the heir to the home, Dr. Montague and his subjects—Theodora and Eleanor—take up temporary residence in the house, which quickly has a dramatic effect on Eleanor’s psyche. As Eleanor’s grip on reality slips, it is unclear if she is especially perceptive to the supernatural or if the supernatural is a manifestation of the seething anger concealed by her timid personality. Either way, she was primed for a breakdown already. For years, she suffered under the “millions of daily trials and irritations” Jackson wrote fiction to take the edge off. Caring for her ailing, cantankerous mother kept Eleanor so isolated and lonely that her sanity teeters quickly under the stress of a haunted house.

In one of Hill House’s most memorable scenes, just after leaving home, Eleanor witnesses a little girl refusing to drink from a cup that does not have stars on the bottom: “Don’t do it, Eleanor told the little girl; insist on your cup of stars; once they have trapped you into being like everyone else you will never see your cup of stars again.” The scene is one of Hill House’s most resonant as the cup of stars stands in for Eleanor’s rebellion against sensitivity and timidness. A mother now myself, I understand completely the frustration the mother in the cafe must have felt when her daughter refused to drink from a regular glass. Yet, also, like Eleanor, I understand the powerful draw of getting exactly what you want. The little girl’s insistence and Eleanor’s fixation on it encapsulate the “daily trials” she seeks to escape, but also the desire for something special to keep as one’s own. The reason to escape, and the escapism. 

In “Notes for a Young Writer,” Jackson explains: “Later, when other characters are talking of their own comfort and security, the lonely girl announces proudly that she has a cup of stars; this is by then not only recognizable as an outright lie, but a pathetic attempt to pretend that she is neither lonely nor defenseless. ‘Cup of stars’ has become a shorthand phrase for all her daydreams.” Eleanor creates the fiction that she also has a cup of stars, a coping mechanism as she begins to fall apart.

The absolute reality of our moment is often scarier than a ghost story: the climate crisis, a pandemic, war, wildfires, mass shootings, and so on. The temptation to escape into dreams allows release from the weight of reality. And yet for many, horror provides an escape from horror. In the introduction to The Magic of Shirley Jackson, her husband, Stanley Hyman, notes how the tension she holds between fiction and reality makes her work suited to stand the test of time, calling her scarier stories, “fitting symbols for our distressing world.” He continues, “If the source of her images was personal or neurotic, she transformed those images into meaningful general symbols; if she used the resources of supernatural terror, it was to provide metaphors of the all-too-real terrors of the natural.” Perhaps The Haunting of Hill House resurfaces regularly in adaptations and “Best of” lists because of how aptly and personally Jackson understood the need to dream to cope with everyday life, no matter how mundane or horrible (or both) it may be.

– Kasey Butcher Santana

Author’s Note: Rereading this essay months after writing it, I am struck by how much sleep deprivation impacts a person’s psyche. Everyone in our house sleeps through the night again, and thus my child appears much more flattering without the “veil of fiction” Shirley Jackson wrote about. We are still, however, dealing with the mystery of the roof.