Domesticity Is the Real Monster in ‘Shirley’

A new biopic casts horror writer Shirley Jackson as a villain — but it’s the forces that drove her to cruelty we should be scared of

Jude Ellison S. Doyle
GEN
Published in
7 min readJun 4, 2020

--

Photo: Thatcher Keats/Neon

Shortly after the trailer for Shirley, Josephine Decker’s new biopic about 20th-century horror writer Shirley Jackson, hit the internet, I found myself chatting with a…

--

--

Jude Ellison S. Doyle
GEN
Writer for

Author of “Trainwreck” (Melville House, ‘16) and “Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers” (Melville House, ‘19). Columns published far and wide across the Internet.