I recently read "Life Among the Savages," a memoir about mothering by Shirley Jackson, who is most famous for the short story "The Lottery". While I found her prose style to be a little long winded at times, she succeeded in making me laugh out loud more than once. I think the first paragraph of the book was my favorite:
"Our house is old, and noisy, and full. When we moved into it we had two children and about five thousand books; I expect that when we finally overflow and move out again we will have perhaps twenty children and easily half a million books; we also own assorted beds and tables and chairs and rocking horses and lamps and doll dresses and ship models and paint brushes and literally thousands of socks. This is the way my husband and I have fallen into, inadvertently, as though we have fallen into a well and decided that since there was no way out we might as well stay there and set up a chair and a desk and a light of some kind; even though this is our way of life, and the only one we know, it is occasionally bewildering, and perhaps even inexplicable to the sort of person who does not have that swift, accurate conviction that he is going to step on a broken celluloid doll in the dark. I cannot think of a preferable way of life, except one without children and without books, going on soundlessly in an apartment hotel where they do the cleaning for you and send up your meals and all you have to do is lie on a couch and - as I say, I cannot think of a preferable way of life, but then I have had to make a good many compromises, all told."
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