With grateful thanks to Toast reader Alicia for the idea.
Chapter 1: Before You Conceive
Conditions Of Absolute Reality
Remember To Use Stones • Stand By Yourself Against The Hills • Are You Walking Toward Something You Should Be Running Away From?
Chapter 2: Just What’s Inside Of You?
God! Whose Hand Were You Holding?
Strangers Have So Much To Be Afraid Of • A Pretty Sight, A Lady With A Book • She Wants Her Cup Of Stars
Chapter 3: Mother, Mother, I’m Coming, I’m Coming, Mother, Just A Minute Mother, Mother, Stop Banging On The Walls, Mother I’m Coming, Mother Mother ᴍᴏᴛʜᴇʀ
On The Moon We Speak A Soft, Liquid Tongue
Look Down On The Dead Dried World • A Huge Cloud Of Looming Nothingness • There’s No One Here Named Charles
Chapter 4: Some Of Us Take Very Little Sugar
Find Something Else To Bury Here
Teeth And Colored Stones • The Pressing Occupations Of Growing And Dying • Here Is A Treasure For You To Bury
Chapter 5: It Could Be Born A Werewolf
A Path You Followed Once Before In Happiness
The only person in the world you have left to hate, now that your mother is dead, is your sister. You dislike your brother-in-law and your five-year-old niece, and you have no friends.
Chapter 6: You Can’t Help It When People Are Frightened
Children Growing Up Like Mushrooms In The Dark
Don’t Stay At The Lake After Labor Day • Huddle Up And Wait • This Man Is Not Your Husband But A Beautiful Stranger, Who For Some Unknown But Perfectly Logical Reason, Has Come To Take His Place
Chapter 7: My Mother Was The First Cat
No One Lives Any Nearer Than Town
No One Else Will Come Any Nearer Than That • The Small Sweet Bones • The Third Baby’s The Easiest • People Are Starting To Come Apart
Chapter 8: Eat The Year Away
God! Whose Hand Were You Holding?
God! Whose Hand Were You Holding? • God! Whose Hand Were You Holding? • God! Whose Hand Were You Holding?
Chapter 9: Nothing Is Ever Really Wasted But You Have Let More Time Go By
Now We Are Going To Have A New Noise
In ten years I will be a beautiful charming lovely lady writer without any husband or children but lots of lovers and everyone will read the books I write and want to marry me but I will never marry any of them. I will have lots of money and jewels too.
Chapter 10: Put Death In Their Food And Watch Them Die
Put Your Hands Around Her Neck And Pinch
Fear Makes Strangers Of Friends • Buy Her A Rocking-Horse And A Doll And A Million Lollipops • See Something Beyond The Faces Of Your Children
Why am I doing this? Why am I doing this? Why don’t they stop me? • Why am I doing this? Why am I doing this? Why don’t they stop me? • Why am I doing this? Why am I doing this? Why don’t they stop me? • Why am I doing this? Why am I doing this? Why don’t they stop me? • Why am I doing this? Why am I doing this? Why don’t they stop me? • Why am I doing this? Why am I doing this? Why don’t they stop me? • Why am I doing this? Why am I doing this? Why don’t they stop me? • Why don’t they stop me?
Tags: advice, pregnancy, shirley jackson, what to expect when you’re expecting
Related Posts
How To Tell If You Are In A Shirley Jackson Story
Loco Parentis: How (Not) to Talk to a Pregnant Woman
Abortion, or What We Want from Chickens
How To Impress The Good-Looking Butches At Your Local Pet Supply Store
First Steps: Searching for My Birth Family
Tocolytic: On Pregnancy, Premature Birth, and the Female Body
The careful use of punctuation and small caps in chapter 3’s title sent chills down my spine. I would read this whole book, and then finish late at night, and then notice a stirring fullness in my viscera and the absence of my menses. But I’d know what to expect.
I read this on my phone at first, so all the characters except the “h” and the “r” came out as boxes, which made it approximately 500000% more horrifying.
◻◻◻H◻R.
I think that’s the phonetic spelling
Reading this & I think my last egg just made an Irish goodbye LOVE IT
AHHHHHHHH
Brilliant.
Suddenly I have an urge to read some Anne Sexton.
Awesome. Mallory, have you always lived in the castle?
“Are You Walking Toward Something You Should Be Running Away From?”
I’m thinking of getting pregnant, and this is the question I ask myself every day.
The answer is yes. But it’s also no.
Same.
I swear to God that’s very close to a line from Strangers With Candy. That is obviously intended as a massive compliment.
EDIT: Found it.
Chuck Noblett: “I’m not pushing you away. I’m pulling me towards myself.”
that’s actually a quote from shirley jackson herson – haunting of hill house. @rolotomassi5
The Pressing Occupations Of Growing And Dying
actual shivers. Sooooooo good.
I don’t know why, and brief Googling has not yielded up anyone with a similar name who fits the bill, but when she comes up I always think at first that Shirley Jackson was one of the radical feminists of the second wave. For this piece it pretty much works, I think.
I always think of my kindergarten teacher of the same name, which makes this even more horrifying.
Shirley also wrote some funny, happy books about her children, which are well worth reading.
oh god but there’s always the undercurrent of HORROR lurking just below the surface, especially because her husband was such a monster, in a way they’re even creepier
They are SO GOOD for that reason. I am haunted by the understated way she describes the time her son was hit by a car. (He was ok!)
Just did a quick bit of searching re: Stanley Hyman’s monstrosity and OH MY GOD. I guess I’m going to need to reconsider my opinion of Jackson’s domestic fiction in a huge way. D:
I am a 51-year-old Crone who’s been a Jackson fan since childhood, and it delights me every time you feature her in your writings. It’s more collaborating than quoting, and it’s just spot-on.
THE CALL IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE WOMB
i am now fairly certain, because i read this entire article here today, that when i am in fact ready to sprog, a copy of the fully realized book version of this piece will materialize on my night stand.
this is my fate. my fate and yours.
Should’ve kept those doors sensibly shut, missy.
This was amazing. Absolutely amazing. Too much to send to my baby sister – currently pregnant with her third child???
If she’s got two kids already, she probably already knows about all the horrors of raising children. I’d go for it.
That’s a true story.
This was actually much less horrifying than I was expecting. All of these would make amazing short story titles. Well, almost all.
I am currently pregnant and also just finished reading The Haunting of Hill House like two days ago so I think maybe Mallory has the terrifying ability to reach out and touch my mind?
And how did you like it?
(the correct answer : “very much, and also I haven’t slept in two days”)
The first year: And we sang! And we sang! And we sang!
a nursery rhyme to teach your baby: “Merricat, said Connie, would you like a cup of tea? oh no said Merricat you’ll poison me. Merricat, said Connie, would you like to go to sleep? down in the boneyard ten feet deep!” As kids, my siblings and I all read Castle and went around chanting this.
It is so shocking to realize that she died before the women's movement had really even begun.
"Everything was going to be very very very good, so long as she remembered carefully about putting on both shoes every time, and not running into the street, and never telling them, of course, about where she was going; she recalled the ability to whistle, and thought, I must never be afraid."
From "The Bird's Nest"
Picked it up in a bookstore and flipped to this sentence – just finished reading it.
I knew Shirley Jackson's ex-daughter-in-law a couple decades ago. All I say is that she remarried and was a really good gardener.