Who wants to be normal? Especially with Sally, her goal is to be normal, but when it really comes down to it, that’s not who she is, and that’s not what she wants to be. Why is that? Because they have power.Īnd I think that’s a big part of these books. And yet, still, little girls want to dress up as witches on Halloween. For many girls and women, the mythic figure of a witch is a very important figure, and witches have been kind of co-opted by-I don’t want to say the patriarchy, but I don’t know how else to say it-to be seen as ugly and old with warts.

I think that’s why I was always attracted to witches-it was the freedom to feel things and the freedom to be emotional and the freedom to follow your dreams or do what you want to do without caring much about what other people think. And when you protect yourself from feeling anything, you’re kind of in trouble. I think that what happens with Maria in Magic Lessons is that she does what a lot of us do when we want to protect ourselves.

For me, it’s been an unfolding process over twenty-five years with these four books.ĮL: Part of what happens in The Book of Magic is an attempt to finally break the curse, so it must have felt cathartic to write it.ĪH: It was cathartic because I felt so involved with them and wanted them to be able to do that. I think that sometimes you don’t really know what a book’s about until you write it. I didn’t understand that that’s what it was about. They’re a family that has been cursed in love, and really, the family goal is to break that curse. Even when I wrote Magic Lessons, which takes place in the 17th century, with the character Maria Owens, her issues are the same issues that Sally and Gillian are dealing with centuries later. He just walked into the room, and there he was, fully formed.ĮL: What do all these characters mean to you, after living with them all this time?ĪH: They’ve come to mean a lot to me because it’s been over twenty-five years that I’ve spent with them, being in the same world with the same family with the same issues. It happened to me again with The Rules of Magic, when it turned out that Franny and Jet Owens had a brother Vincent. When I first sat down to write it, I felt like the characters had arrived.

I don’t know what the book is, but I’m going to write it. I just kept thinking that this was a terrific book. Make lists of titles, and I had this title Practical Magic.

Can you talk about that a little more?Īlice Hoffman: Well, the way I came to Practical Magicwas-I’d never done this before, but I do Massachusetts, and Sally and Gillian, Franny and Jet, walked in after you, ready to tell their story. Enchanted Living: In the cover note to The Book of Magic, you talk about that day in the summer of 1993 when you walked into a tiny shed on a marsh in Wellfleet,

Alice hoffman the book of magic