Alice Hoffman’s life has taken several unexpected turns since she wrote “Practical Magic” in a shed overlooking a Cape Cod marsh more than 30 years ago. Some more magical than others.
She survived breast cancer. Her husband left her for a friend. She went to divinity school. She got a new dog.
The women in “Practical Magic” wrestle with grief and betrayal, believing in a higher power and, of course, love.
Any similarities were subconscious, Hoffman said.
But in the decades since publishing “Practical Magic,” a novel about an outcast family of witches in Massachusetts, Hoffman, now 74, has identified a personal connection to the story, which has gone on to influence much of her literary output since.
This includes her latest novel, “The Witches of Cambridge” — set both in the 1950s and in Puritan New England — which comes out on Sept. 8.
“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,” she said in a recent interview, over sorbet and pie, at a Harvard Square restaurant. “I didn’t want to be that person. I wanted to have a normal life. But what’s a normal life?”
“Practical Magic” is built around Sally and Gillian Owens, wholly different in personality but bonded by sisterhood and witchcraft. Long before “coven” became a cultural touchstone, Hoffman created the sisters and their two aunts, who help women struggling with lovesickness, broken hearts and a hunger for revenge, offering spells and potions without judgment.
All the while, the Owens women battle their own curse: A man who falls in love with an Owens woman will be struck dead.
It took time, but the 1998 film adaptation, starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman (as Sally and Gillian) and Stockard Channing and Dianne Wiest (as their aunts), became a cult classic. Now the family is back onscreen in “Practical Magic 2,” out Sept. 11.
Hoffman talks about “Practical Magic” in terms of luck. How the characters “walked in” the shed door in Wellfleet, Mass., one summer. How Bullock happened to read the novel and wanted to turn it into a movie. How the timing came together for a sequel.
But Hoffman is also a big believer in making your own fate. Such was the case when she broke off with her editor over plans for the novel. Witches and magic weren’t “considered literary” at the time, she said.
“She and the copy editor wanted me to change everything — every single word was circled, including the last paragraph,” Hoffman recalled. “It was the moment when I thought, you know what? I didn’t become a writer to do this.”
“I think they thought I was going off the deep end or something,” she added. “So I left.”
Hoffman believes the movie ultimately caught on in large part because of a yearning for female-centered community. Nostalgia for the 1990s also played a heavy role. Both the novel and the film ended up “connecting people in a really deep way,” she said, as fans leaned into the idea of a coven as a group of women helping each other. “I think that really matters to people.”
But the staying power of “Practical Magic” — now memefied, perfume bottled and developed as a musical by Norah Jones — surprises even her. For starters, the movie was a flop at first.
“It was considered a chick flick — there weren’t movies about women,” Hoffman said. “The only one I can think of is ‘Thelma and Louise’ and that doesn’t end very well.”
The eventual embrace of the movie led Hoffman back to the Owenses two decades later. She would go on to write three more books in the series: “The Rules of Magic” (2017), “Magic Lessons” (2020) and “The Book of Magic” (2021), on which the new film is based. (It’s been rereleased under the movie’s title.)
Many of Hoffman’s books bring magical realism into the everyday world, convincingly conveying that the two realms can coexist. The feeling of being of an outsider came early to her.
Born in New York City, she grew up on Long Island in the 1950s. Her mother, a social worker, was divorced and had a rotation of boyfriends. Some family members cut them off.
“I’m not saying she was a witch, but she was very bohemian at a time when it was very unacceptable,” Hoffman said. She felt the same way the Owens sisters felt when friends’ parents would not allow visits to Hoffman’s house.
At 21, Hoffman wrote her first book, “Property Of,” about a romance between a teenager and a gang member. She has gone on to write more than 30 novels.
Marysue Rucci, Hoffman’s editor for the past 11 years, called her “the most prolific writer I’ve ever worked with.”
“She finds the kernels of history and then creates these wonderful worlds around them without being pedantic,” Rucci said. “I love that about her.”
In “The Witches of Cambridge,” Hoffman wanted to write about friendship instead of sisterhood. “In my life and so many people’s lives, their friends become their family and they have a coven of friends,” she explained.
The book started as a term paper while she was enrolled at Harvard Divinity School, from which she graduated in 2024. She was looking for something new — an escape, a new way to live her life, she said — but in the end found something a bit familiar.
Students were asked to write about someone at Harvard with whom they disagreed. Hoffman immediately knew she wanted to examine the life of Increase Mather, a Puritan and an early president of the university. He also had an active role in the Salem witch trials.
Hoffman asked if her term paper could be a work of fiction. Now it’s planned as the first in a series.
In “Witches,” Hoffman interweaves Mather’s story with the lives of two friends at Radcliffe College during the 1950s. Ava is from a small Maine town and discovers her witch lineage while at school. Lauren’s fearlessness leads her down a darker path of magic. McCarthyism is the backdrop.
Hoffman threw herself into research, attending Radcliffe alumna meetings, visiting the Schlesinger Library, which focuses on the history of American women, and peering into the private collections of Harvard’s Museum of Natural History.
The book hammered home to her that “magic, science and religion are not that different from each other,” Hoffman said, adding that while she doesn’t always set out to incorporate magic into her writing, it often finds her.
“I feel like, isn’t it all magic?” she said. “Whether it’s the weather or falling in love with somebody. How does that happen?”
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