Nothing Like Being Scared
At the height of her fame, “The Lottery” writer Shirley Jackson’s life was falling apart. Victoria Best chronicles the author’s personal pain as she finished her 1962 novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle:
“For some time, Jackson had been battling serious health issues: she was morbidly obese, suffering from asthma, arthritis and the side effects of a cocktail of amphetamines and tranquillisers. In the three years it had taken her to write We Have Always Lived in the Castle – three times longer than any of her other books and yet this was her shortest – everything had worsened. She began to be troubled by attacks of colitis that left her sick and faint. The anxiety that they could occur at any time kept her ever closer to home, and she was aware, with her sharply-honed sense of humour, that the book was mining too close to her own fears. ‘I have written myself into the house,’ she declared in a letter to a friend, and in one to her parents, describing how well her work was going: ‘there’s nothing like being scared to go outside to keep you writing.’”