It’s Shirley Jackson’s birthday today, author of The Haunting of Hill House. I’d wax poetic about her, but Garrison Keillor already beat me to it on today’s Writer’s Almanac:

She was a very eccentric woman. For most of her life, she heard voices and music that no one else could hear, and she believed that she was psychic. She kept half a dozen cats in her house and she said they often leapt up on her shoulder and whispered poems in her ear. She read dozens of books about witchcraft, and claimed that she had once used a voodoo doll to break a man’s leg.

And…

The people in her town talked about her behind her back, calling her a communist and atheist and a witch. Neighbors said the house was full of monstrous dust balls, and the children always had dirty tangled hair. She felt as though everyone in town was watching her and judging her, and she began to dread running into people at the local grocery store.

And…

Shirley Jackson said, “I tell myself stories all day long. I have managed to weave a fairy-tale of infinite complexity around the inanimate objects in my house… No one in my family is surprised to find me putting the waffle iron away on a different shelf because…it has quarreled with the toaster… It looks kind of crazy, of course. But it does take the edge off cold reality.”