The Book of Magic
The Book of Magic
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Alice Hoffman on The Book of Magic
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A series that readers willed into existenceHoffman published ‘Practical Magic’ in 1995 with no intention of returning to the Owens family. The series exists because readers refused to let the characters go, sending letters asking about characters Hoffman had left in the margins of the original book.
I didn’t think of it as a series until my readers started to write to me, and say they really wanted to know what had happened to the aunts and what their life had been like before Sally and Gillian came into their lives.
After writing two prequels that moved backward in time, Hoffman finally turned to face forward. The question that drove ‘The Book of Magic’ was not about plot mechanics but about whether generations of inherited damage could ever be undone.
I wanted to know if it was possible to break a family curse and to live your life without the burden of your family history.
Four novels and more than two decades after the first book, the obligation to close the story became impossible to ignore. Hoffman described that obligation in structural terms: once a family saga reaches a certain scale, the readers and the characters both need somewhere to land.
Once you start having many novels about the same family, it feels like there had to be some sort of closure for the family and for the readers and also for me. [paraphrased from audio]
That need for closure was not only structural. Hoffman had spent so long inside the Owens family’s troubles that finishing the book cost her something personal.
It’s hard for me, because it’s been over 25 years of writing about the same characters. And I feel very close to them and very involved with them. I cried a lot when I was writing this book!
The tears were not just sentiment. She was closing down a world she had been building since 1995, and she knew she would not return to it.
How she wrote it
Grimoires, a forgotten poet, and a library built from griefThe book’s most unusual research thread traces back to Amelia Bassano, the real historical figure widely proposed as Shakespeare’s ‘Dark Lady’ and the first woman in England to publish a book of poetry. A single biographical detail sharpened Hoffman’s interest in her beyond the literary connection.
As soon as I heard that she was Jewish, I found her even more interesting.
Researching Bassano’s England surfaced a fact Hoffman had not encountered before, one that reframed the historical stakes for the entire novel. The discovery gave the book’s persecution thread a specificity that a purely invented history could not have supplied.
I had done research into the state of the Jews in Europe and in England, and hadn’t known that they were all expelled for so many hundreds of years in England. That, to me, was a really fascinating part of the research.
Bassano’s role in the novel is not merely decorative history. Across all four Owens books, Hoffman has been building a sustained argument about language as a form of power, and Bassano became its sharpest illustration: a woman whose strength was the very thing that brought punishment down on her.
Part of what I’m writing about in these books is how important languages are; Amelia Bassano was the first woman in England to publish a book of poetry. That was her strength and her power, and she was punished for it.
The novel opens in a library, and that choice was not incidental. Hoffman’s relationship with libraries goes back to an unhappy Long Island childhood in which they were the first places she could exercise genuine autonomy.
Libraries opened the door to the rest of my life when I was a girl. It was the first place where I could make my own choices when I picked the books I wanted to read.
Franny’s sacrifice at the end of the book required Hoffman to trace the arc all the way back to the opening pages of ‘Practical Magic’, where the aunts take in two orphaned girls and reorganize their lives around them. The ending, she told the ‘Hollywood Reporter’, was the only one that honored what the first book had established.
Practical Magic starts with Franny and Jet doing anything they can for these two little girls with nobody, and that’s their lives, and they’re still willing to do that at the end. It’s kind of the perfect ending, in a way, that now Sally and Gillian are able to take care of themselves — and they’re the ones that are going to have to watch out for the next generation.
The personal thread
Magic as the compound of spells and human tiesWhen asked to define what magic actually means across the Owens books, Hoffman resisted separating the supernatural from the emotional. The answer she gave, during a podcast conversation about ‘The Book of Magic’, collapsed the distance between charms and the things people do for one another.
And so in my books, the magic is really very mixed up with everyday life. And magic also includes things like hope and love and sisterhood and, you know, family ties. So it’s the magic of spells and charms and herbs, but it’s also the magic of what people are to each other. [paraphrased from audio]
The title she gave the book, ‘a love letter to books,’ is not marketing language. Hoffman’s own childhood story runs beneath it: libraries as the first refuge, reading as the first form of self-determination, and a personal collection of magic books and grimoires she has been assembling for more than 25 years.
The Book of Magic is really a love letter to books.
The novel opens in the Owens Library because that is where Hoffman has always understood power to begin: in the room where a person first gets to choose what she reads.
What she wants us to sit with
The curse breaks, but the watching never stopsThe Owens curse, which punishes any man who falls in love with an Owens woman, functions in the novel as a stand-in for something Hoffman believes is common to most families. Her argument, as she laid it out for the ‘Hollywood Reporter’, is that the choice to keep going despite inherited damage is itself a form of defiance.
The thing that I thought was the most important was for the curse to be resolved. … Many of us feel like we have historical family trauma and, in a way, are cursed because of what happened to our family before us. I really thought it was important [to convey] the idea that we can continue on despite that.
Before she reached that argument about trauma and continuation, she had already distilled the book’s answer to a single line in the Pennie’s Pick interview. It is the shortest version of what four novels have been building toward.
That love is the best sort of magic.
Hoffman has watched how the Owens books travel between readers over the years, and the pattern she described to ‘Hey Alma’ mirrors the generational logic of the novels themselves: knowledge moving not downward through institutions but sideways and backward through women who recognize something in the story.
I’m really happy, because I think what I would have wished for has already happened, which is that 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.
The Owens women pass a grimoire from hand to hand across centuries. Hoffman’s readers, it turns out, do the same thing with the books themselves.