‘Shirley’ Writer Sarah Gubbins Breaks Down The “Complicated” Ending

Warning: This interview contains major spoilers for Shirley on Hulu, particularly the Shirley ending.

Shirley screenwriter Sarah Gubbins was surprised when she learned that Shirley Jackson, one of the most celebrated horror writers of all time, didn’t have much faith in herself as a writer.

“I thought, ‘You write the most anthologized short story in American fiction, you probably are pretty set,'” Gubbins told Decider in a phone interview. “But that it was not her experience.” The short story she’s talking about is “The Lottery,” which, despite its critical acclaim and legacy, also resulted in mass cancellations for The New Yorker and hate-mail for Jackson. Shirley, which is now streaming on Hulu and on-demand, picks up in the months after its 1948 publication. Jackson (Elisabeth Moss) is in a depressive episode, confidence shattered, and yet still finds the strength to write her next novel: 1951’s The Hangsaman, about a young college girl who is slowly driven mad.

Based on a novel of the same name, Shirley is not a traditional biopic. The plot—which follows a young couple named Rose (Odessa Young) and Fred (Logan Lerman) who come to stay with Jackson and her husband (Michael Stuhlbarg)—is largely fictional. The form, led by director Josephine Decker—best known for her 2018 critically acclaimed drama Madeline’s Madeline—is experimental and strange. But at the heart of Shirley is a very truthful portrait of an artist and a woman that will leave you feeling both inspired and morose.

Gubbins, who is a Chicago playwright and the co-creator of I Love Dick with Jill Soloway, spoke with Decider about creating that feeling of truth, writing sex scenes that give women agency, and how she interprets the Shirley ending.

Decider: Tell me how the script for Shirley started for you. 

Sarah Gubbins: I’m a long time reader of Shirley Jackson. I think most people got introduced to her from reading her in high school—I read “The Lottery” in high school English class. You don’t forget it, after you read that story. It hits you like a rock to the head. So I’d had an admiration for her work, and had read some of her other novels. I never really thought to do any sort of depiction of her as a character in a feature until I read Susan Merrell’s novel Shirley. The idea of having a character come to live with Shirley Jackson, who maybe Shirley wasn’t particularly keen on having live with her, felt like the beginning of a really great premise for a movie. Then the more I looked into Shirley’s life, and came to understand the reception of “The Lottery”—while it was so wildly lauded, there was a huge backlash against it. She received so much hate mail. She really had to crawl out from the infamy and celebrity she experienced around that story. That, to me, also felt like a particular moment in a writer’s life. She really displayed a lot of courage to be able to do that—to quiet the voices of criticism that were already pretty rampant, and basically go on to become this incredible novelist.

Tell me about your research process. 

I felt the first thing I needed to try to understand was the ways in which she thought and how she wrote. It was kind of a detective process. I read all of her novels, all of her short stories, and started to assemble an idea about her style, or at the very least, some of the ideas that she held as preoccupations—the split-psyche, the litany of female heroines. Then I read an early biography of her. Ruth Franklin’s biography hadn’t come out when I was writing the movie. But I did read her correspondence with Stanley [Edgar Hyman, Jackson’s husband], and her letters in the Library of Congress. That gave me a very first person, much more vulnerable look at the ways in which she encountered the world. Particularly the intimacies between her and the machinations in her relationship with Stanley.

We know that the young couple who comes to stay with Shirley and her husband are fictional, but can you talk about the details that are true, that might surprise viewers?

In a very general way, I hope that the film captures a sense of her incredible intellect, her incredible wit. She was often the smartest person in every room she walked into. She had such a keen ability to observe things—it was almost a witchy sense. She could really read people, and I think you see that a lot in her novels, the ways in which her characters observe the world, or how she observes the world. She was deeply committed to Stanley’s reception of all of her work, so that relationship of bringing her work to Stanley, having an editor/writer relationship, as well as being married to that man, was true to life. And they did live in Bennington, and they did have these wild parties. She was consternated by housework and was a wonderful cook. She enjoyed a cocktail or four.

What I learned in the letters was that she had a deep struggle with writing, even though she wrote all the time and was incredibly prolific. It wasn’t something she felt was a virtuosic skill of hers. She deeply felt the agony of a loss of self-confidence in her writing, while she was in it. She did suffer from agoraphobia and I think, piecing things together, there was a feeling that she had of being an outsider.

I appreciate that the sex scenes in Shirley are rooted so firmly in the female perspective, never veering into the “male gaze.” How do you achieve that on a script level?

I think it’s two parts. One is, you write from that character’s desires. You write that in, that leads the action. Always moving that character into scenes, and out of scenes, and through scenes from that place of desire and their own agency. They’re never objects. They’re forces of change, and they’re agents of actions. That’s a thing you can do on a script level, which is what we did. We were very conscious of that. Then, two, it’s the interpretation. You can write all you want, but if you don’t have a director like Josephine Decker that really invests in making sure that the film feels like it’s coming from Rose, then, you don’t stand a chance. You can write all you want, but depending on how it’s shot and how it’s conceived, it’s really about the execution.

Let’s talk about the ending. (Spoiler alert!) I know we see Rose driving away with Fred, but I’m half-convinced that Rose took her own life on those rocks, much like Jackson’s main character in Hangsaman did.  Is the ending, to you, in any way ambiguous? 

It’s a complicated ending. More than anything, c. That act alone—it doesn’t have to carry anything more. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s climactic, in a sense, to finally be seen. I think that the ending, from what I take away from it, is the same thing that I take away from reading Shirley’s work. Which is, I’m profoundly affected by her. I’m not the same as before I knew her. In essence, that is at the heart of the ending. We see the ways in which both of those women ultimately had a very profound effect on the other. I don’t think Rose is ever going to forget the time that she spent with Shirley, and I don’t think Shirley will ever forget what Rose did for her.

The old Rose is dead, as Taylor Swift might say.

Yes. So in some ways, I think your reading is right. That character is dead. That person, that idea. We were talking about the gaze—and I think that’s the other thing. I think, in some bigger sense—and I love Decider, I love how thoughtful you guys are, so I say this to you—I think the encounter with Shirley Jackson is a way for women to really start to feel, and see how fully they can live. There’s so much in Shirley’s work. There are aspirational premiums. “I need to get out, I need more. I’m unhappy here. The confines of who I’m told to be don’t fit me.” That’s something that Shirley imbues in Rose. That old version of self is just never coming back. That’s why she says that to Fred, “Oh, no. We’re not going back there. We’re never going back there.”

For those inspired to read Shirley Jackson by your movie, where do you recommend they start?

I think her collection of short stories, and “The Lottery,”  is fantastic. Once you’re feeling like you’ve got your feet on the ground, I think going to the end of her work — which is this novella called We Have Always Lived in the Castle — is a phenomenal, phenomenal place. But please, once you’re there, go back and check out Hangsaman. Because I do think it’s quite a masterpiece.

Where to watch Shirley