Last October I was listening to my car radio on the way to a dance lesson. I heard an intriguing teaser for an upcoming broadcast of the Diane Rehm Show: A panel of readers would be discussing a classic horror novel. “Please, PLEASE,” I said to the radio. “Let it be The Haunting of Hill House.”

It was.

The Haunting of Hill House belongs to a genre I don’t usually read. But it also belongs to a genre (if you can call it that) I always read: books by Shirley Jackson. When I was in high school I read and reread her hilarious reminiscences about her family: Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons.

But here’s the thing. No one I know (except my older sister, who first brought Life Among the Savages home from the library) has ever mentioned reading anything of Jackson’s except her shocking short story “The Lottery,” which I read for the first time in high school. Not long after that I read The Haunting of Hill House and was absolutely terrified – the most frightened I’ve ever been by a book. But nobody else I know has ever mentioned it (not even the aforementioned sister).

So hearing that Diane Rehm was devoting an entire hour to Shirley Jackson was a delightful surprise. And then there was another one. A librarian friend saves discarded New York Times Book Reviews for me (I can’t afford to buy the Times because all my spare cash goes into dance lessons).

As I was leafing through an issue from last year, I found an enthusiastic article about Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons called “Household Words.” The author, Ruth Franklin, will be publishing a new biography of Jackson in September: Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life. (I’m so excited about the forthcoming book that I’m not even going to gripe about seeing “rather” – a word I hate – in the title.)

So it’s finally happened: People are talking about Shirley Jackson! (Life Among the Savages was published in 1953. She died in 1965 at the age of 45.)

Sometimes I feel so alone in my reading habits. I like Louisa May Alcott and James Hillman (talk about an odd couple!). I think Liberace’s autobiography was a wonderful book. My favorite mystery is The Hatter’s Phantoms by Georges Simenon. He was one of the world’s best-selling authors, but I’ve met very few people who’ve read his books.

I’m sorry to tell you that despite a sincere effort, I disliked all three volumes in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, etc.).

Listen: I love John Grisham’s books. Does that count for something? Is there a club I can join?

I’ve read almost everything that C.S. Lewis ever published. He probably had more influence on my thinking than any other writer. Who reads Lewis today? Only a small number of evangelical Christians, and I don’t include myself in that group.

Maybe you sometimes have that same feeling of living in a weird universe where you’re the sole inhabitant.

I think Shirley Jackson would say that you’re not really alone. Maybe the world is trying to catch up with you. Ruth Franklin, writing in the New York Times Book Review, says that Jackson’s family-themed pieces “feel surprisingly modern.” And – truth to tell – I shouldn’t have given you the impression that people didn’t like her writing. She made more money through those family stories (which were published in women’s magazines) than her husband did as a professor and literary critic.

But nobody – least of all Jackson herself – expected people to be reading Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons more than 60 years later. And now they’re out in new editions, waiting for you to enjoy them…and to be inspired (when you can stop laughing – they’re really funny) to use your writing to connect with people who are waiting to hear from someone as special as you are.