I’d read both of Shirley Jackson’s most famous novels, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, but I was not ready for how much I loved her book about motherhood, Life Among The Savages. It was so funny I would stop and read excerpts out loud to my wife until she read it, too. The writers who gave me the most comfort in early quarantine were women grappling with art and domesticity — May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude, Eleanor Coppola’s Notes on a Life, and Anne Truitt’s Daybook — but none of their books made me laugh.