For many years, a young Susan Scarf Merrell harbored a secret. On the outside she seemed like any other respectable, research-driven writerly type. Her father was an academic -- an economist -- and her mother was a journalist and nonfiction author. Ms. Scarf Merrell studied psychology at Cornell University and went on to pursue the type of writing that tells the truth. Her book "The Accidental Bond: How Sibling Connections Influence Adult Relationships" was published in 1995.
She also wrote "stories for women's magazines, who would pay enough money to make a living -- $3,000 to $5,000 for articles about how to teach your child to get dressed and things like that," she said. Brainy, bespectacled, and immensely charming, she was exactly the kind of woman with whom you could trust your child's wardrobe.
Privately, however, she longed to occupy a world that was more ruinous. One that was full of impingements on reality, where one never knows whom to trust, and which usually leads to a life of indigence. In other words, she wanted to write novels.
"I had always really secretly wanted to be making stuff up," she laughingly said over a recent Zoom call. "It wasn't about not telling the truth, but telling a truth as I imagined it."
Her first novel, "A Member of the Family," was published in 2000 by HarperCollins, inspired by a true story she had seen on the television show "Dateline." Set in Sag Harbor (also home to Ms. Scarf Merrell and her husband of over 30 years, James Merrell, an architect), the story revolves around Michael, a Romanian toddler adopted by a nice, suburban American family. But by age 5, Michael has torn the family apart with his violent and emotionally disturbed behavior. The family must consider the unthinkable: sending the boy back.
Its reviews were mixed. Publishers Weekly wrote about the author, "she is less knowledgeable about the craft of fiction: throughout the narrative, subplots waver into loose ends. . . ."
Ms. Scarf Merrell's breakthrough as a novelist came 14 years later with her next book, "Shirley: A Novel," a psycho-thriller that meshes fiction with the real-life story of Shirley Jackson, the writer of sinister books and stories, who claimed she had occult powers and was "a practicing amateur witch," earning her the moniker "Virginia Werewolf."
Ms. Jackson, who died in 1965 at the age of 48, had settled in Vermont in the mid-1940s with her husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, a literature professor at Bennington College, and their four children. She found literary success with her work, though struggled to be seen as anything more than a faculty wife. Still, it was she who was the family's main breadwinner and funded their madcap spending sprees and booze-filled lifestyle. Ultimately, however, her legacy was mostly that of a damaged, desolate, creepy, tortured soul -- a tragedy that too often beset talented and ambitious women of a certain era.
Ms. Scarf Merrell became somewhat obsessed by Ms. Jackson's gothic world while doing a low-residency M.F.A. program at Bennington College, which she completed in 2009. At first she thought she would like to write a "looking for Shirley Jackson memoir," but that produced five years of "writing badly" and many false starts, she said.
"Then one day I was walking with a friend in the woods near my house in Sag Harbor, and I said that I still didn't know how to tell the Shirley Jackson story. And she said, 'Well, what if in the story somebody goes to visit them and saw their family?' And I said, 'Oh my God, that's it!' And that was the moment when the book finally clicked."
So, into the real-life psychodrama of Shirley Jackson Ms. Scarf Merrell introduced an invented Rose Nemser, a teenage wife and expectant mother who arrives in Vermont with her husband, Fred, to live with Shirley and Stanley. Fred, a young scholar, assists Stanley with his teaching needs, and Rose spends her days with Shirley, who writes and takes care of her family. Introducing the young couple proved to be the perfect conduit for readers to glimpse the explosive and menacing, yet enchanting, Jacksoneque landscape. The book was adapted into a 2020 movie starring Elisabeth Moss in the title role.
Was the author pleased with the way her words had been reimagined for the screen?
In high school, Ms. Scarf Merrell recalled, she took a class called Literary Echoes, which involved showing how past works, the Old Testament, for example, inspired later stories such as "Romeo and Juliet," "West Side Story," and "J.B.: A Play in Verse," an Archibald MacLeish drama that's based on spiritual inquiry.
"And Jackson and her husband were incredibly well educated in the literature of the world going back, and a lot of her work was based on old myths and things like that," Ms. Merrell said. "So, when the book came out, I felt it was an homage to work that was itself an homage to other work. When I was on the set, and when I saw the film in full, I had that same feeling of being part of a continuum of art." That the filmmakers "had taken my book, which was a reflection of Jackson's work, and put their own interpretation on it . . . I felt part of an artistic lineage."
Still, the book-to-movie payout notwithstanding, being an author is rarely a pathway to fortune, particularly at Ms. Scarf Merrell's rate of two novels in almost 15 years. Cleverly, in 2010, she joined the teaching staff at Stony Brook Southampton, where she is a co-director, with another author, Meg Wolitzer, of a novel-incubator program, BookEnds, and the Writers Conference. She also teaches in the M.F.A. in creative writing program.
It's a time-consuming job, she admitted. Next year's BookEnds program, a one-on-one mentorship course for novelists and an occasional memoirist whose finished manuscripts need extra spit and polish, will require reading about 85 novels, from which the committee will select 12. Yet she said she finds this curricular work deeply satisfying, given the publishing success rate of many of her Stony Brook Southampton students, including Caitlin Mullen, whose debut novel, "Please See Us," won an Edgar Award in 2021 and was named one the top 10 crime novels of 2020 by The New York Times.
"I love living in these dreams that people have. Somebody has imagined this dreamscape, and I have this good fortune to be trusted to go in there with them and walk around in their dreams and help them figure out what it means and what they're trying to do. I just feel so lucky. There's no part of my life which is drudgery, except maybe filling out grade sheets," she said with a laugh.
So, only one question remained, perhaps the most asked question of authors today: What of society's new "cancel culture," the fear of writers causing offense, and the growing list of things one cannot say?
Ms. Scarf Merrell's answer arrived in an email: "I think about this a lot, about what universal stories I can imagine without running up against the limitations of my singular imagination. Mostly it's a matter of point of view -- so my character Rose imagines what Shirley might have done or be thinking -- a layer away from the idea that I, the author, claim to know The Truth. If fiction's job is to help us to develop more empathy and understanding, we always need to be taking into consideration what our own truths are. I don't think this is a new task, per se, but it's a new time in the world."12
