Parenting & Family Quote by Shirley Jackson

Jackson’s joke lands because it’s delivered with the calm authority of a novelist who knows exactly how to make menace sound like domesticity. Calling Life Among the Savages “disrespectful” is a sly inversion of the era’s sentimental mothercraft: the polite expectation was that children should be idealized, their chaos edited into wholesome anecdotes. Jackson refuses the varnish. She frames her own household as a foreign country and her children as the “savages,” not to dehumanize them, but to puncture the myth that family life is naturally orderly if a woman just tries harder.

The subtext is double-edged. On one side, it’s affectionate: only someone paying close attention can describe children with the precision that reads as mockery. On the other, it’s a quiet act of rebellion against the midcentury cult of domestic competence. “Memoir” signals seriousness and literary control; “my children” yanks it back into the realm of bodily noise, need, interruption. The tension between those terms is the point. Jackson claims authorship over a space that’s supposed to consume her whole identity.

Context matters: Jackson wrote these pieces in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when she was also producing fiction that weaponized the familiar (The Lottery, later The Haunting of Hill House). The same sensibility is here, just turned comic. “Life among” implies anthropology, a cool observational stance, as if the mother is simultaneously insider and field researcher. That little pose of distance is her escape hatch: humor as self-defense, and disrespect as honesty in a culture that demanded reverence.