Right before Shirley Jackson began working on her 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House, a postcard depicting a California mansion started bothering her. “It was an ugly house,” she wrote. “[A]ll angles and all wrong. It was sick, diseased.” She wrote to her mother, who still lived near San Francisco where Jackson grew up, and asked if she knew anything about it. Her mother replied that her “great-grandfather had built it. She remembered when the people of the town got together one night and burned it down.” Soon, Jackson was at work on the best haunted house novel I’ve read.
Hers was the first number I memorized when I learned to use a telephone. She would answer, a little curious and with a Brooklyn air of “Who the hell is this?”, which gingered up as soon as she heard me say “Hi, Grandma.”
I’d call every day when I got home from my North Hollywood elementary school. Whenever I felt a sharp pain in my ribs, or just generally off, I went into our butter-yellow kitchen and dialed. “It’s gas,” she usually said, in a raspy pack-and-a-half timbre. After moving from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, Syd had enrolled in a program that trained low-income women to become nurses. She practiced until her early sixties, mostly in convalescent homes where she called her patients “my babies.” After she retired, she became the family’s Florence Nightingale. I was her most demanding patient.
Mike Bacchus remembers the man only as “the Texan.” A few years back, the Texan, well into his seventies, was a guest at New Zealand’s Lakestone Lodge, which Bacchus and his family own. The man had made his way from Texas to the Mackenzie region of New Zealand’s South Island for the landscapes, to see vivid swathes of violet lupins set against blue glacial lakes and snowy peaks rising beyond golden tussocked hills. He hadn’t realized one of the most glorious sights in Mackenzie is revealed after sunset. In a region with some of the darkest night skies in the world, the vast sweep of the Milky Way dwarfs even the towering summit of nearby Aoraki, or Mount Cook.
One evening, Bacchus invited his guest to step outside. The Texan’s first instinct was to raise his hand. The stars were so vivid it seemed as if he could reach out and clasp them. Standing beneath the great bowl of the heavens, the man bathed in starlight and emotion. He told Bacchus he was seeing the stars clearly for the first time since he was 10 years old.
The Last House on Needless Street is complex and multilayered, but more like a multiverse than an onion. Time is iffy and everyone is erratic. There is a truth we begin to see relatively early on, but when you're standing on shaky ground and the narrative keeps throwing curveballs your way, believing you know what's happening is almost impossible.
Birth may be one of the few experiences shared by every person on the planet, but the material culture of human reproduction has often been overlooked. Michelle Millar Fisher, a curator of contemporary decorative arts at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, and Amber Winick, a writer, design historian, and mother of three, offer a corrective with this collection of essays, photo-essays, and interviews. Like the Instagram account the authors have used to share their research over the last few years, it’s highly visual, filled with many striking full-bleed images, but this is no coffee table book — it’s a tome thick with footnotes, dealing with matters of life and death, fascinating and unsettling in equal measure.