Terrifying and Triumphant: A Q&A with Grady Hendrix
Has a book ever totally changed your life? A group of teens at a home for pregnant girls face adversity, shame and more until a book of witchcraft changes everything for them. Terrifying and triumphant, you won’t put this one down. Read on for an exclusive Q&A with Grady Hendrix on body horror, history, witchcraft, wayward girls and more.
Witchcraft for Wayward Girls (B&N Exclusive Edition)
Witchcraft for Wayward Girls (B&N Exclusive Edition)
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They call them wayward girls. Loose girls. Girls who grew up too fast. And they’re sent to Wellwood House in St. Augustine, Florida, where unwed mothers are hidden by their families to have their babies in secret, to give them up for adoption, and most important of all, to forget any of it ever happened.
They call them wayward girls. Loose girls. Girls who grew up too fast. And they’re sent to Wellwood House in St. Augustine, Florida, where unwed mothers are hidden by their families to have their babies in secret, to give them up for adoption, and most important of all, to forget any of it ever happened.
IM: Today, I have the privilege of speaking with Grady Hendrix, bestselling author of My Best Friend’s Exorcism, The Final Girl Support Group, How to Sell a Haunted House, and more. Grady, thank you so much for being here today. Let’s dive into your new book, Witchcraft for Wayward Girls. Can you please set up the story for us?
GH: Witchcraft for Wayward Girls is set in a home for unwed mothers in 1970, and it’s about four of the girls who’ve been sent there. They’re teenagers, they’re pregnant, and their parents want to hide them away. While they’re there, they find a paperback book that’s a how-to guide to witchcraft. In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, there were a lot of these books, like How to Be a Sensuous Witch and Everyday Spells, and this one just happens to give them real magic. It’s a horror novel — complications ensue.
IM: Where did this story really start for you? What sparked it?
GH: Many years ago, I found out that two of my relatives had both been sent away when they were teenagers, and this didn’t come out until they were much, much older. It always haunted me — how on Earth could anyone go through that, and why was it considered the best solution, to hide women away in maternity homes if they were pregnant and single? I always felt like there was a story there because the setting was so good. I mean, a house in the middle of nowhere that’s hidden, where a bunch of teenage girls who are all pregnant, who’ve all been told they’ve ruined their lives and done the worst thing ever in the history of their lives, how a story couldn’t be there was beyond me.
There had to be something there because it was such a good setting. That thought floated around in my head for a very long time, and then I read a book by Mary MacLane called I Await the Devil’s Coming. It was a big hit when it came out — it was about this teenage girl who wanted to marry Satan. There was something about her voice that really flipped a switch in my brain. I wrote the first page of this story, and then I thought, ‘okay, she’s going to a home for unwed mothers, so the first thing that’s going to happen is she’s going to be in a super long, really bad car ride with one of her parents.’ I started from there, and I actually wrote a couple of drafts of this book as a faux car book before we all admitted it wasn’t working. I wound up moving it to witches, so I sort of figured this one out as I was working on it.
IM: Is that typically what you do? Do you go in and outline your plot before writing a word of the story or do you write by the seat of your pants?
GH: I always think I have a very carefully outlined story, and I’m usually wrong — in this case, I was more wrong than usual. There were so many moving parts to this story. With Haunted House there were three very different versions of that book, but the biggest difference was in the last third. There was one version that ended with a puppet cult. There was one version that ended with a family of inbred puppeteers. There was one version that ended with a roadside marionette museum. They were all really different, but the major differences lived in the last third of the book. In this case, I was rewriting this book from start to finish again and again and again. I seem to be getting worse at my job.
IM: I would argue the opposite — I think this is my favorite of yours so far. I grew up in Florida, and I always love reading books that capture its unique atmosphere.
GH: I couldn’t write about Charleston again and I didn’t want to do Savannah, so I thought, ‘what’s another historic city on the eastern seaboard that’s got a major downtown area based on tourism?’ I’m out of cities now.
IM: I was particularly blown away by the last third of this book. Do you ever go into your novels already knowing the ending, or do you need to spend time with your characters before you really figure that out?
“I spent so long on this book . . . I resigned myself to the fact that this one would never be released . . . no one ever got anywhere by quitting in the middle.”
GH: I usually know my ending, but it always changes. With Southern Book Club, I knew they were going to have to kill the vampire — it’s a given. With Haunted House, they were going to have to get rid of the spirit, the haunting, and with this one, you start with a bunch of pregnant girls, so it’s going to end with childbirth. You just can’t avoid it. There was a moment where my editor really pushed on that and said we shouldn’t end it with childbirth. I think it’s baked into this story. There was a really different ending for this one, and I really clung to it for several drafts. There came a point when it was painfully obvious to everyone but me that it wasn’t working, so I reluctantly took it out behind the barn and shot it. The thing my editor and I went back and forth over was the ending set in 1970. The actual ending happens there, and it was really tough to land, but I got it somewhere where I think it works.
I spent so long on this book. I usually write a book a year, and this took me almost two years. It’s so weird to me that this book is out in the wild with other people reading it. I resigned myself to the fact that this one would never be released. There was a point where we had a conversation about switching books. But ultimately, no one ever got anywhere by quitting in the middle.
IM: That’s really interesting to hear because I especially loved the cast of characters at the heart of this novel. The four girls, Fern, Rose, Zinnia, and Holly. Which of these girls’ characters came to you first, and how did you find their individual voices? They’re such great characters and you do tend to have strong ensembles in your books.
GH: The first was the voice of modern-day Fern, but then Rose came quickly after, and she was so much fun to write. Fern was always a work in progress. She functions as the reader’s perspective, and because the material is so intense, you want her to be someone the reader’s comfortable spending a lot of time with, but at the same time, you don’t want her to be bland. She was really tough for me. Holly was fully formed early on, but I had to do some serious thinking about her before the last draft and changed a lot with her. She was too convenient for a while; she did too many of the things I needed her to do to move the story along, and I needed her to get more complicated. Zinnia and Rose were the easiest to write because Zinnia is like a top girl. She’s smart, she cares about people, she’s reasonable. I had a lot of people reading this book who did not like these girls. A lot of beta readers in early drafts thought they complained too much. I made Zinnia the voice of reason to be the mouthpiece for people feeling like these girls needed someone to shake ’em a little bit. Funnily enough, my favorite character got cut from the book. There were five girls originally — there are five moths on the cover because the designer read the draft with five girls in it and created a moth for each girl. Myrtle was the one who was in complete denial that she was pregnant and spends the book saying, ‘Everyone’s got rocks in their head, man, I’m not pregnant.’ She was in such denial about it. I loved writing Myrtle, but Myrtle came to a really bad ending and it was very depressing. The book was running long, and I thought it worked better with the core four.
IM: Would you ever write something separate from your novels, like a bonus short story or novella for Myrtle or one of your characters that you’ve spent time with in the past? Do you prefer to shut the door and leave things be when the book is done?
GH: Normally, no, a book is a book. It’s done. I get everyone where they need to be, and then I walk away from them, and I don’t like to go back. Doing a short story from Myrtle’s point of view is a good idea, though — I might steal that.
IM: I loved the excerpts from How to be a Groovy Witch interspersed throughout the book. What was it like to write those and did you reference anything when you wrote them?
“I thought of them as a revolutionary cell. These were women fighting the man, the establishment, and they were on the run.”
GH: Absolutely — the weirdest thing about it was what I referenced wasn’t what I thought I was going to. I read a lot of books on witchcraft, paganism and all that, but I didn’t want to steal any of that because that’s a lot of people’s beliefs, and it’s not the kind of magic I needed. I read a lot of activist literature from the ‘70s and late ‘60s, separatist groups, political action groups, militant revolutionary groups — that’s where the voice really came from. If anyone’s ever read the Anarchist Cookbook, they will recognize the tone of Groovy Witch. That’s how I came to my witches; I thought of them as a revolutionary cell. These were women fighting the man, the establishment, and they were on the run.
IM: I’d love to go back and talk about setting for a minute — St. Augustine is a very unique city in Florida. It was interesting to read about it in that time period after growing up so near to it, because that’s where people go on vacation nowadays. That’s where you go to see the ‘spooky’ side of Florida. It’s a really unique setting, and it’s one of the oldest permanent European settlements in the United States. Can you walk me through setting your book there?
GH: I needed a place to set it, and I was looking for a city I could wrap my head around. I was looking specifically at Florida because a lot of homes for unwed mothers were either put at the end of a rail line or put at a junction of several rail lines because they were easier to find. I mean, a girl would just be put on a train and go herself. Getting off at the last stop was an easy direction to remember. St. Augustine made a lot of sense. I went down there for a little over a week, and I was at the Historical Society reading everyday. I think I read every newspaper published between May and September of 1970 to get a feel for it. I’d go out and walk in the woods, go out driving at night, and walk around downtown. A lot more of the book was originally set in downtown St. Augustine — in fact, in early drafts, Fern shoplifted How to Be a Groovy Witch out of a drugstore downtown.
“There are a bunch of ghost stories and historic buildings, but there’s also past layered on top of past layered on top of past . . . I like when history just gets piled up on top of itself.”
I was also interested in St. Augustine because it was a civil rights hotbed of violence and resistance. It was a really active location, in terms of being a place where things happened. There are a bunch of ghost stories and historic buildings, but there’s also past layered on top of past layered on top of past. There was a history of Black resistance there out of Fort Mose, and then it became a white supremacist kind of enclave, and then it became a real sight of some serious civil rights struggle. I like when history just gets piled up on top of itself. I always feel bad having bad guys in a book — I usually feel like everyone has their reasons, but I felt very comfortable making the cops the bad guys in St. Augustine, Florida, because given their history in the 1960s, there was nothing to recommend about the police department at the time.
It was interesting to go through the St. Augustine paper, because in 1970 after what happened at Kent State in May of that year, there was all of this unrest on campus with radical elements. There was this real feeling among the older people of the long-haired, ungrateful kids, and among kids of these old people clinging to power who would kill them to preserve it. You can look at the student takeover of Florida Memorial College down in Miami. It was really a crazy, crazy time.
IM: That brings me back to Rose and something that she says in the novel — she tells the girls that they can’t rely on ‘the old lady’s generation.’ She’s speaking about the librarian who gifted them How to be a Groovy Witch. I’m really interested in that generational divide that you wrote about, with the girls in the school versus the parents and the adults running the house. What made you want to write about that and set it in that time period?
GH: At first it wasn’t part of the book. When I started doing the research is when I realized that was the back beat of the times, this generational split and the feeling that anyone over 25 or 30 wasn’t trustworthy. The evidence pointed in that direction, and that was something I really wanted to lean on because all these girls in the home have done the most natural thing in the world. They’ve gotten pregnant, and they all are treated like criminals. Reading things that are written about unwed mothers and single mothers from the 19th century all the way up through the two thousands, even to today, there is a tone of shaming and blaming. There was a book I read from called Counseling the Unwed Mother. It was a guide written for ministers who had members of their congregation who were unwed mothers. It does the typical thing a lot of these books did; it gives the scare statistics, there are X number of unwed mothers every year, there are x number of illegitimate pregnancies, blah, blah, blah. At the end of it, it says, ‘You will note that we do not have any statistics for unwed fathers. They simply do not exist.’
“I wondered where anyone’s compassion was for these kids.”
I had been working on this book for a while at that point, and it hit me really hard that it had never crossed my mind to think of where these dads were. It had never factored into anything I was reading. These girls are all treated as if they went out and got in trouble on their own. You need two people to make a baby — that’s just the way it is. This is probably not a professional thing to say, but it made me really hate adults on a deep, deep level. I thought about my relatives, and I thought about them as teenagers and how ashamed they were made and how they were told to never talk about having their baby because what they’d done was so wrong. I wondered where anyone’s compassion was for these kids. I wrote this book really hating anyone over the age of 19.
IM: I think it’s very hard for me to not find empathy for teenage girls at any period of time.
GH: I was starting from a position of caring about these girls, and I realized that not everyone was going to start there, so I needed to sell people on these girls. I needed them to understand where that empathy should come from. That changed a lot of how I was writing about them. This book, for a very long time, was written in first person from Fern’s point of view in present tense. I didn’t want people to feel like it was a faraway kind of history. I realized that was doing two things: it was making the material too hot and too in people’s faces. I needed to make it third person, and I needed to make it past tense because the girl’s emotions were too heated. I needed the reader to know that this girl may be freaking out, or she may be having a meltdown, or she may be saying it’s the end of the world, but that I, as the author knew it wasn’t.
IM: That speaks to the precious relationship between the author and the reader. There needs to be a sense of trust there.
GH: Exactly. That’s what I was really trying to do. I’ve got a cousin who’s an adoption lawyer, and for people who think this doesn’t happen anymore, there are still maternity homes out there. There was just a big New York Times article on maternity homes that are calling the police on the women staying there. Maternity homes have changed. They’re not the same as they used to be before Roe vs Wade, and they’ve changed since then, but they are still out there. There are still teenagers getting pregnant and their parents freaking out and not knowing what to do.
IM: Going back to the great third act of the book again, without giving too much away, you have a gnarly birth scene. At the home, the girls regularly talk about rumors of what happened to their moms, friends, sisters and aunts when they all gave birth. I think giving birth is the original body horror in a lot of ways, and that kind of unbearable werewolf transformation happens to women every day. It’s such an interesting vessel for these really powerful moments. What was it like to write that scene?
“You so often see birth treated as this site of primal horror or this site of soft-focus, misty-eyed sentimentality. I wanted to depict the intensity of it.”
GH: I worked with a lot of moms who shared their birth stories with me, answered questions and read drafts. I worked with a lot of midwives, MDs and laborists who all read drafts and gave me advice. I really wanted to do it right. You’re not wrong, birth is body horror, and it was something I was terrified of all my life, even though I’m a dude and I will never give birth, for some reason as a kid, it really stuck in my head is this most horrific of all horrific scenarios. It’s not. It’s the most intense thing anyone will ever go through aside from death. You so often see birth treated as this site of primal horror or this site of soft-focus, misty-eyed sentimentality. I wanted to depict the intensity of it. There are two birth scenes in the book: I wanted one scene to be a very hospitalized and clinical 1970s childbirth, and I wanted the other to be the opposite of that. That one might go wrong at any minute. I hope I hit those two contrasting things. I didn’t want it to just be body horror. I wanted it to be triumphant to some degree. I don’t want to spoil anything for anyone reading this, but I know there are people who’ve read this and said they were tense throughout because they knew a scene of childbirth was coming up. First, there’s a guy writing it, and second, it’s a horror novel. I really just wanted to try to write something that was real to the experience women were sharing with me and that I was reading about and seeing. I’ve got no firsthand knowledge, but I really am grateful to the people who shared with me.
IM: I do think it turned out very triumphant, that last scene especially. I also thought the baby’s growth updates in between chapters really helped to build that tension and it was a great stylistic choice.
GH: I also really wanted to have something in there that celebrated midwives because they’re so important. I’ve never met one who was just going through the motions. They are in it to win it. They’re so disregarded and really patronized to some extent by a lot of people. Listen, obstetricians do amazing work — I’m not badmouthing them, but midwives are in it with you in a way that no one else is except the mother. I really wanted to give some midwives a moment to shine.
IM: Lastly, who are you reading now?
GH: I am reading so little new stuff just because I’m working on the show for the witch book, so I’m reading a lot of witch books. I just read two books that are older, and I feel like they’re a little forgotten. The Tulip Touch by Anne Fine and Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner. I was doing an event with Alix Harrow and something came up about Lolly Willowes and I was like, ‘oh my God, you’ve read it.’ At that point, I would’ve loaned her a donor kidney.
IM: That’s the best feeling. Thank you so much for your time today.
GH: Thanks for having me.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
