Practical Magic
Practical Magic
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Alice Hoffman on Practical Magic
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A title in a notebook, a shack on the marshThe book began before the characters did. Hoffman keeps a running list of potential titles for novels she has not yet written, and one name had been sitting there waiting. What happened next, in a rundown Cape Cod cottage one summer, was so unlike her usual process that she has never stopped remarking on it.
I had a notebook with a list of titles, and one of the titles was Practical Magic. And I thought, ‘this could be a good book. I like this title.’ I was staying on Cape Cod at a little rundown house, and there was a shack that was on the marsh. So, I went in there one day and started the book, and they came to me. That had never happened before, and it’s never happened since.
The isolation she felt growing up on Long Island, raised by her mother and a Russian grandmother, shadowed her for decades before she connected it to the outsider women she kept writing. The realization arrived late, and it reframed the entire Owens family in her own mind.
I don’t think I’ve realized until very recently that I’m writing about witches because I was an outsider, and that’s the way I felt my whole life. I didn’t want to be that person. I wanted to have a normal life. But what’s a normal life?
The Owens women also filled a specific gap in Hoffman’s biography. She has no sister and no daughter, and the novel let her inhabit a kind of bond she had never had access to in her own life.
Writing these books was a way for me to kind of experience that sort of love that I think is so important in people’s lives. [paraphrased from audio]
That admission reframes the whole project: the witchcraft is a premise, but the love between women who share blood and history is what Hoffman was actually chasing.
How she wrote it
No outline, one summer, then a fightHoffman’s usual practice involves deliberate construction, but with this book she abandoned every tool she normally relied on. The characters arrived fully formed in the shed, and she did nothing but follow them until they were done.
I was working in a little shed, and I walked in there, and by the time the summer ended and I walked out, I had the book. I’d never experienced that before. The book just came to me. I felt so lucky that these women just appeared. It was like magic for me, and never before or since have I had that experience.
The speed and ease of the drafting did not protect the manuscript from what came next. When she delivered the finished book, the response from her editor was not celebration but a line-by-line demand for revision so total it put her entire career as she had understood it into question.
She and the copy editor wanted me to change everything — every single word was circled, including the last paragraph. It was the moment when I thought, you know what? I didn’t become a writer to do this.
She found new representation rather than comply. The book that emerged without a plan, written in a single season, was ultimately the one she refused to dismantle.
The contrast with how she approached the other books in the series is striking. When she wrote Magic Lessons, the prequel set in 17th-century England and Salem, she drew on a magic library she had spent over twenty-five years assembling and conducted months of historical research. Practical Magic required none of that. She had no research notes, no plot outline, only the summer.
I didn’t plot out the story. I didn’t write down what was going to happen. It just happened.
The personal thread
Outsider status, worn without knowingThe Owens curse, which dooms any man who loves an Owens woman to an early death, functions in the novel as a reason the sisters stay apart from the town around them. Hoffman came to understand it as something she had drawn from her own sense of not fitting in, not as a deliberate artistic choice but as an unconscious one.
I don’t think I’ve realized until very recently that I’m writing about witches because I was an outsider, and that’s the way I felt my whole life. I didn’t want to be that person. I wanted to have a normal life. But what’s a normal life?
The Owens women are feared by their neighbors for exactly the qualities that make them capable. Hoffman sees that dynamic as something women recognize from their own lives, and she has said that what she hoped readers would find in the book is close to what she was searching for when she wrote it.
Women do identify with the story of a witch, and the story of an outcast, and the story of a woman who’s powerful and strong who isn’t appreciated for those things, who’s feared for those things. Maybe what I was looking for myself is what I hope that my readers also feel: Books are magic and love is magic.
What she wants us to sit with
Sisterhood outlasts the curseThe Owens family curse, the witchcraft, and the murder at the book’s center are all structural machinery. When Hoffman describes what the novel is actually about, she sets all of that aside and lands on something much more domestic and much harder to manufacture.
It’s always been about the core, basic story, which is the love of Sally and Gillian, even when they’re furious at each other, even when they feel like they hate each other. It’s all about their relationship and how they’re there for each other, and the importance of women’s relationships in general.
The 1998 film adaptation was dismissed when it opened, and the book’s early readership was modest. What happened afterward, over years of women quietly passing the story to other women, became the real reception history of Practical Magic.
It’s so interesting because, as a book, it did okay. As a movie, it did terribly when it came out. There weren’t movies with women in it about sisterhood and friendship. And as time has gone on, things have changed, and people have shared this movie, men and women alike, and it’s just become kind of a cult thing because it’s about something that you can’t find that easily, but that you feel is part of your life.
Hoffman has a specific theory about why the film’s reputation grew while the critics who dismissed it moved on. She locates the reason in what the story was always doing that the culture was not yet ready to name as important.
Nobody went to see it when it came out. And every year it becomes more popular, which is so interesting to me. I almost feel it wasn’t the right time for it. It was one of the first movies that had basically a cast of women. The men are there, but they’re not as important as the relationships between the women.
The act of sharing the book is, in Hoffman’s view, itself a continuation of what the book argues. The Owens women pass their knowledge down through generations, and readers appear to be doing something similar.
Women tend to share these stories with each other — grandmothers and granddaughters and sisters share the books, and it’s a way to connect with other women and with your own story in history.