Circe
Circe
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Madeline Miller on Circe
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
Odysseus has told his story long enoughThe book began with a thirteen-year-old’s frustration. Miller had come to the Circe episode of the Odyssey already primed: she knew a witch who turned men into pigs was in there, and she wanted the full story. What Homer delivers is a scene of perhaps a dozen lines before Circe falls to her knees and invites Odysseus to bed. That gap between what the episode promised and what it delivered never left her, and the question it produced became the novel’s engine.
With Circe, it was the mystery of why she was transforming men to pigs. How did she start doing such a thing? Odysseus never asks her, and Homer doesn’t tell us.
Miller noticed something structural about why the mystery exists in the first place. The Circe section of the Odyssey is not a neutral account: it is Odysseus narrating his own adventure to the Phaeacians, which means every detail has been selected by a man with a motive. Seeing that frame made the whole episode look different.
The Circe section is not only contained within kind of the traditional male heroic model but is actually one of the parts of the Odyssey that is narrated by Odysseus himself, telling the story to the Phaeacians. If you look at it [in] that light, it becomes an incredibly self-serving story. Here’s Odysseus: he shows up on the island of this terrifying witch; he defeats her; she throws herself on him, and falls in love with him, and invites him to stay! It’s a story designed to make him look really good.
That observation about the Odyssey’s framing also carried a broader claim about the epic form itself. Miller set out to write a counter-epic on purpose.
The decision to write a new epic rather than simply a novel was a deliberate formal choice, not a marketing category. Epic poetry had excluded women’s experience at the level of subject matter, Miller argued, treating birth, motherhood, and domestic knowledge as beneath the genre’s dignity. She designed the book to enter that exclusion zone head-on.
I wanted to create a new myth, a new epic specifically, since women’s lives have traditionally not been considered important enough for epic. Epic poetry always centers on traditionally male stories, war, inheritance, death. But one of the most epic things I can imagine is birth—which has been excluded from epic poetry because it’s traditionally female.
How she wrote it
Four source texts and everything else inventedA single Homeric adjective became the load-bearing beam of the novel’s architecture. Homer calls Circe “the dread goddess who speaks like a human,” a phrase that most readers skim past. Miller stopped there. She explained to the Barnes & Noble audience how much weight she drew from those few words.
That description of her from Homer, that she’s this goddess who can speak like a human, ended up forming the architecture of the whole novel actually. [paraphrased from audio]
The phrase told her what kind of story she was in: not a myth about a divine being, but about a figure caught between worlds, pulled toward the human even while technically a goddess. The Book Riot interview crystallized what that tension unlocked: it was “the story of a woman finding her power and, as part of that, finding her voice.”
The novel built itself chapter by chapter rather than from a complete outline. Miller anchored her plot to four surviving mythological sources (the Odyssey, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica, and the fragmentary Telegony, a lost epic known only in summary), and she held the ending from the start. Everything else was improvised in sequence.
In very early drafts I had given Telemachus a narrative chapter of his own... having him narrate his own chapter broke the novel. The whole point of the story is that it’s Circe’s! As soon as I cut that chapter, the novel started working again.
Miller’s theatrical background, years spent directing and studying adaption at Yale School of Drama, left a visible mark on how she conceived of point of view. She did not think of the novel as a third-person narration with a camera that could cut away. It was closer to a stage monologue.
My background is in theatre. I was a theatre director for many years. In a way I conceived of both my novels as monologues — that the character is telling their life story.
Research was deep and selective: Miller dived into classical commentaries and herbology when a specific section demanded it, then surfaced. She estimated that only a fraction of what she learned ever appeared on the page. But some of what she found worked its way in sideways, as a mirror rather than a source.
I wrote this whole section about how she discovers her magic, and then I was reading back over it, and I was like, wow, this sounds a lot like my writing process.
The question of which ideas the reader should bring to the next chapter drove her more than any structural plan. Across interviews she returned to one formulation of how a story asks to be read.
I’m always thinking: This is the story I know, but what is the story I haven’t been told?
The personal thread
The writing process that became the magicMiller designed Circe’s witchcraft, her pharmakeia (the herb-based magic the novel depicts), as something earned through labor rather than inherited through blood. The distinction mattered to her at a thematic level she stated plainly.
I wanted it to be part of her power that was solely hers, and not related to her divinity. Witchcraft is something that you have to do. It’s not something that just exists. It’s something you have to work for and work at. Therefore, it’s not something that people can take away from you. Because you create it yourself.
Miller has described her writing process as slow and iterative, moving forward only after the previous chapter has been thoroughly worked through. When she looked back at a key early section of Circe, she found that her own method of gradual discovery had written itself into the character without her intending it.
I wrote this whole section about how she discovers her magic, and then I was reading back over it, and I was like, wow, this sounds a lot like my writing process.
On what the book is wrestling with
When power makes you worse, not betterThe gods in the novel are not simply frightening. They are a case study in what unchecked privilege does to a person’s capacity for empathy. Miller shaped them that way deliberately, and she drew on psychological research to explain to Ezra Klein why absolute comfort produces cruelty rather than generosity.
That was something that I really wanted to explore in Circe: this idea of when you do get everything you want, when you do have absolutely everything, it doesn’t make you a good person, actually. It makes you kind of a terrible person.
The word “witch,” Miller pointed out across several interviews, has never been a neutral descriptor. It has historically been applied to women whose power made those around them uncomfortable, and it is still used that way. Writing Circe as a witch was therefore also an act of reclamation, one Miller connected directly to the anxieties she saw encoded in Homer’s original portrait of the character.
Transformation is Circe’s greatest gift. She is an artist, & art itself is transformative. An artist forges raw materials into beauty and meaning. That meaning then has the ability to change all those who experience it.
In the PBS NewsHour video, Miller was asked whether Circe’s experiences felt relevant to the contemporary moment. Her answer refused nostalgia: the ancient setting does not put these experiences at a safe distance.
Unfortunately, many of the things that Circe endures, being belittled, undermined, kept from the halls of power, sexually assaulted, these are all things that we are still dealing with today. And I think it’s really important to look at sort of the fact that there’s a historical throughline here. [paraphrased from audio]
What she wants us to sit with
Empathy as the whole pointMiller has consistently described fiction’s power in terms of what it can do that argument cannot. Speaking in the plotz interview, she explained why stories reach people who would resist a direct claim, and why she thinks that capacity is the medium’s most important one.
empathy is really the project of storytelling... it is about being able to imagine yourself into someone else’s life... it’s the way that I feel like literature and storytelling can save the world, because it can sneak past people’s defenses in ways that if you just tell them, you can’t. [paraphrased from audio]
Part of what Miller wanted readers to carry away was a corrected picture of what a hero is. Modern readers bring assumptions about moral virtue to the word, assumptions that would have puzzled Homer entirely. Circe, for Miller, works as a hero in the older sense: she has great strengths, catastrophic failures, and she keeps moving.
When we use the word hero today, we are talking about someone who’s a moral hero... But the ancient Greek heroes were really not like that. They were people with enormous strengths and also enormous weaknesses... and in seeing their mistakes, we connect with our own humanity and flawed nature. [paraphrased from audio]