We have always lived in the castle.

Along with art I also want to talk about novels and authors that I enjoy. Recently I read "We have always lived in the castle" by Shirley Jackson.

This author's most famous work is titled "The lottery", it was originally published in 1948 and was met with much complaint and controversy and can be read here

It's unfortunate that I had already known what the story was about before I read it, but it would be much more interesting if you go into it blind, it's also very short and I encourage you to read it.

I learned about "We have always lived in the castle" when I searched up characters in media who seem to display signs of Schizotypal personality disorder, an illness I was diagnosed with when I was 18. While my diagnoses have changed shape many times over the years I still do strongly identify with STPD and my search turned up that Merricat, the narrator and main character of the novel, was the best depiction of STPD that many people had ever seen.

The novel is about Merricat, her sister Constance and their uncle Julian who live together in a large estate, the rest of their family having all died in a mysterious and tragic incident involving arsenic and a sugar bowl.

I have several quotes from the novel saved as I was sending them to loved ones as I read, whenever Merricat was particularly relatable to me or I just enjoyed what I had read. If you find them interesting, I encourage you to read the book yourself.

"The trees around and overhead were so thick that it was always dry inside and on Sunday morning I lay there with Jonas, listening to his stories. All cat stories start with the statement: “My mother, who was the first cat, told me this,” and I lay with my head close to Jonas and listened."

"On Sunday mornings I examined my safeguards, the box of silver dollars I had buried by the creek, and the doll buried in the long field, and the book nailed to the tree in the pine woods; so long as they were where I had put them nothing could get in to harm us. I had always buried things, even when I was small; I remember that once I quartered the long field and buried something in each quarter to make the grass grow higher as I grew taller, so I would always be able to hide there. I once buried six blue marbles in the creek bed to make the river beyond run dry. “Here is treasure for you to bury,” Constance used to say to me when I was small, giving me a penny, or a bright ribbon; I had buried all my baby teeth as they came out one by one and perhaps someday they would grow as dragons."

"When I was small I thought Constance was a fairy princess. I used to try to draw her picture, with long golden hair and eyes as blue as the crayon could make them, and a bright pink spot on either cheek; the pictures always surprised me, because she did look like that; even at the worst time she was pink and white and golden, and nothing had ever seemed to dim the brightness of her. She was the most precious person in my world, always."

"I was pretending that I did not speak their language; on the moon we spoke a soft, liquid tongue, and sang in the starlight, looking down on the dead dried world."