My grandmother wasn’t like other people’s grandmothers. Not only did she live in a house perched on stilts over a lake in northern Florida — where she calmly contended with alligators, water moccasins, and violent thunderstorms daily — but she also knew how to wish warts away. Yep. Warts. She didn’t make a big deal of it or anything, but if you had a wart bothering you, she would close her eyes for a moment and in a few days, you’d look down and it would be gone.
My mother went even further, but in the same offhand way. She could direct unwanted warts onto other people. She kept a Wart Enemies List and had once transferred five warts from my little brother onto a mechanic who screwed up the brake linings on our car. She could also secure parking spots simply by wishing for them, and she was always finding money on the street.
It’s not surprising that I grew up thinking that a lot of things were possible that maybe most people wouldn’t have talked about out loud. Not that I took part in any magical shenanigans myself — I didn’t seem to have been blessed with whatever the family magical talent was.
Finding Magic in Writing
Or at least I thought that until I became a writer.
For years I wrote humorous novels about women and families and falling in love and raising children. The main characters in my first six novels were like me, ordinary women who didn’t do spells or have a family curse from the 1600s, like the sisters in Alice Hoffman’s wonderful Practical Magic series. They didn’t attend special schools and commune with owls, like Harry Potter. They were — well, muggles, for lack of a better word.
And then one day, long after both my grandmother and mother were dead, a character woke me up in the middle of the night. This often happened to me when I was ready to start a new book. Somebody would show up and tell me the story. This woman said her name was Blix, and she was 85 years old, she was dying, and she was irreverent and impatient, and searching for someone to take over what she called her little matchmaking projects. Over the next few days, she told me she lived in a brownstone in Brooklyn with her tenants, a group of misfits whose lives seemed to have run aground somehow. She somehow knew when people belonged together, whether they realized it or not.
She was, I realized, a lot like my grandmother and my mother: magical without really acknowledging it. She just quietly went about trying to help but was often rebuffed. She made mistakes. By the time she died, she had turned over her brownstone — and her matchmaking philosophy — to my main character, Marnie, a timid young woman who had just been jilted by Blix’s great nephew. They even shared a mantra — a grouchy one — “Whatever happens, love that.”
Embracing the Magic Within
This story soared in my imagination. Incorporating a kind of hapless magic into my plot filled me with joy. These characters saw sparkles, they sent energy by simply concentrating, and they trusted in things to work out. If a love match was going unrecognized, they ran after lovers in train stations and in restaurants. They butted into conversations. They sent messages telepathically. I think a wart or two even went missing.
At first, writing about this felt a little foolish and self-indulgent, but I was having too much fun to stop. And to my surprise, the more I wrote, the happier I felt. Early readers came forward and happily told me of their own magical tendencies: the “signs” they believed in (often cardinals and hummingbirds), the voices that told them what to do, the hunches they’d followed that led them to the lives they were meant for.
It was during an early edit of the book, though, that I thought maybe I had made a terrible mistake. The developmental editor called me one day and said, “Just what is the magic here anyway? What exactly can this character do and what can’t she do? We need this to be specific.”
But did we? I decided we didn’t. Magic in books is like magic in life, I think — vague and mysterious, working sometimes, failing us at other times, a force slightly beyond our control and yet offering us signs and signals, a tentative road map toward home.
And in each of my subsequent books, a little magic creeps in here and there. Like a sweet hello from my grandmother and mother perhaps.
I’ve realized that I don’t know how the warts went away, just that they did. And that’s enough.
