Free Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin Page A

tried to change your handwriting, you couldn’t change your own peculiar phrases and ways of looking at things.” She agrees to let him publish them under her name: “i’m sort of proud of them.”
    The move, and the alienation that accompanied it, had a profoundeffect on Shirley. Back in California, Dorothy Ayling was one of the first to notice it. Shirley still considered Dorothy her closest friend; at a time when long-distance telephone calls constituted a great occasion and expense, the two wrote to each other regularly, usually with news about boys. Shirley’s letters to Dorothy are lost, but the responses offer some clues about what she must have written. “When have I ever heard you say you weren’t nuts over somebody?” Dorothy wrote when Shirley confided her latest crush. On the surface, Shirley sounded just about the same. But Dorothy began to pick up on signs that something was amiss. “I was just wondering . . . if your mother dropped you on your head when you were a baby. . . . Something is radically wrong in your upper story—if you have any,” she wrote that winter. “Sometimes after I read your letters I wonder whether the climate’s good for you,” she joked a few months later.
    Dorothy tried to make light of the change in her friend, but the transformation was significant. Perhaps it was the move; perhaps it would have happened anyway as Jackson matured. “I beg your pardon—may I?” she wrote in her “Debutante” diary in November, shortly before her seventeenth birthday. She now felt alienated from her own memories of a self she no longer recognized, “a girl who thought too much.” Jackson marked the change in uncannily stark terms: that girl is dead, she wrote, “and her passing is, as I now see, mourned by few. She was a dreamer, and dreamers have no place in our matter-of-fact modern world. . . . A somewhat more matter-of-fact, and infinitely wiser person has taken her place.” Jackson lacked the self-awareness to see that her assessment of her own infinite wisdom was somewhat premature. But, as always, she was able to step outside herself to offer self-criticism. On the same day, she wrote herself a stern note in her regular diary. The tone, and even the words, show just how deeply she had internalized Geraldine’s voice. “Hereafter see that there is a distinction between your present attitude and your former one,” she scolded herself. “You have always prided yourself on inherent good breeding. See that self-disgust does not destroy this rightful pride. One can be friendly without making enemies.” During a year that would have crushed a girl with a weaker ego, Jackson still placed a high value on her own dignity.
    She had always been moody, as nearly all teenagers are. Now, in an extension of the persona splitting of her multiple diaries, she took the unusual step of assigning names to her moods, as if they were characters in a play. The habit continued through her college years and later manifested in her fiction—most strikingly in The Bird’s Nest , her novel of multiple-personality disorder, in which a woman’s mind fractures into four distinct characters, each with her own name and defining characteristics. Jackson called her happiest persona “Irish,” perhaps a reference to the features she liked best about herself: her auburn hair and green eyes. (Later, it would be one of Hyman’s terms of endearment for her.) “Irish has gone—completely and utterly,” she wrote during that difficult fall. “Has she left me to struggle along for myself, I wonder? Or has she merely, elusive as usual, left me when I want her most?” The trouble, as usual, seemed to be boy-related: more of the usual no-date-for-the-dance problems. On New Year’s Eve, she assessed the previous year as “eventful,” “rich in friends,” “colorful,” and “encouraging,” if “not always happy.” Her new year’s resolution for 1934 was simpler than usual: “To be