Born in the Philippines, Jackson grew up in Berkeley, California, where her family ran a small women's bookstore for several years; Jackson later recalled, "I was already in love with books by then....and the family store just confirmed what I already suspected, that books were the most interesting and important things in the world. Of course I wanted to write them!"[2] She graduated from Berkeley High School,[3] and received a B.A. in art from Stanford University and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Brown University.
While at Brown, Jackson was taught by electronic literature advocates Robert Coover and George Landow. During one of Landow's lectures in 1993, Jackson began drawing "a naked woman with dotted-line scars" in her notebook, an image she eventually expanded into her first hypertext novel, Patchwork Girl.[4] Jackson later said that she never considered publishing Patchwork Girl as a print novel, explaining,
|
“ |
I guess you could say I want my fiction to be more like a world full of things that you can wander around in, rather than a record or memory of those wanderings. The quilt and graveyard sections [of the hypertext], where a concrete metaphor that resonates with the themes of the work creates a literary structure, satisfy me in a very corporeal way. I salivate, my fingers itch.[4] |
” |
A nonchronological reworking of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Patchwork Girl was published by Eastgate Systems in 1995 to acclaim;[5] it became Eastgate's best-selling CD-ROM title and is now considered a groundbreaking work of hyperfiction.[6][4] While working in a San Francisco, California bookstore,[4] Jackson published two more hypertexts, the autobiographical My Body (1997), and The Doll Games (2001), which she wrote with her sister Pamela