Celebrity Bio Prozac & Shirley Jackson's long dark night of the '50s

May 1-5, 1975 I read:

Judy Garland, Anne Edwards

This book was brand new then. A year later in 1976, a much better Garland bio came out--Rainbow: The stormy life of Judy Garland, by Christopher Finch (I actually bought that one, and I couldn't afford to buy too many books back then.)

Celebrity biographies are soothing for me. I don't know why. But my guess is that even though I was going through a rough patch, nothing was so bad as what Judy Garland went through--and she mostly kept on tap-dancing.

But it's not just books on Judy Garland. I still remember in the 1980s, when my own life was in turmoil, I frequently went to my bookcase and whipped out a paperback biography of Rita Hayworth to read a few calming chapters.

Another thing about celebrity bios that fascinates me is the "looking behind the illusion" aspect. I always like to do that.

May 1-5, 2005 I read:

We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson

I was curious to look at Shirley Jackson again because she wrote both humor and scary stuff. For me, this book was startlingly slow moving and . . . what can I say? Irritating. The first thing I ran into when looking for Shirley Jackson bios on the web was a woman who said that Jackson's vision of being an outsider in an insular world helped her in adolescence. I have to respect that, but this book did not mesh well with my particular neuroses.

It's not a long book! Less than 200 pages. But I hung in for the first 65 pages by sheer force of will--and I kept irreverently thinking of ways the author could have edited them down to move faster--I do that when reading Dickens too! My main problem here was being stuck inside of the head of a narrator who seemed to me both insane and infantile. The fact that she was facing a hostile village that is a whisker away from shifting into lynch mob mode didn't make me like her better, or--for me at least--make the book move faster. It did pick up after p. 65.

Now I'm reading Jackson's humorous housewife/mom book, Life Among the Savages. One wonders to what degree she was talking about "savages" as cheerful code for her rambunctious kids and to what degree that might refer to her uneasy relationship with the small college town where they lived--particularly after reading some of the Jackson biographical material. There is a very strong 1950s mentality of feeling trapped and repressed by a hostile, small-minded, potentially violent group.

I also thought how different the arsenic poisonings were in We Have Always Lived in the Castle, compared to the vibrant, gleeful, "mercifully" murderous sisters in Arsenic and Old Lace.