INTRODUCTION In the world of Practical Magic , lilacs bloom overnight, the real and the magical overlap, and the Owens women have been witches for generations. This novel is an attempt to unlock the secrets of the human heart. What price are we willing to pay for love? How do we recognize and understand our truest selves? How does our past affect our present? Many of us know what it''s like to try to escape a family legacy of one sort or another, only to discover that in the long run we carry our heritage with us no matter how far we might run. The Owens family is one in which the women will do anything for each other; they may argue, they may disagree, but they are fiercely devoted to one another. Witches are outsiders, and those among us who have been bullied and ostracized can relate to their plight. Part of our fascination with witches is that they are the only female mythic figures with power. These are women who don''t need to be rescued by a prince or a king but, instead, can save themselves--sometimes with the help of a sister. They are wise and fearless women of courage.
In short, they are everything little girls wish to grow up to become. In both Practical Magic and its prequel, The Rules of Magic , girls are always encouraged to choose courage, and Courage Tea is the aunts'' most treasured remedy. Practical Magic is the mythic reconfiguration of the journey most women must make, whether they are sisters, mothers, daughters, or aunts. The Owens women practice magic in the modern world. Sally is the steady older sister who yearns for a "normal" life. Gillian is the wild, unpredictable younger sister who searches out danger. Although they are opposites, each is wary of love, for they have seen lovestruck women come to their aunts for potions and remedies. The original Owens ancestor, Maria Owens, after being abandoned by one of the magistrates at the Salem witch trials, called down a curse upon her family to protect them from the troubles of love.
Sally and Gillian know that they carry Maria''s curse. Both must fight for love in a world that is more dangerous when you open your heart, but which is also more meaningful and joyful once you do. The sisters can''t escape magic any more than they can escape love, and in the end they realize this is a blessing rather than a curse. Twenty-five years after its publication, I am delighted to say that Practical Magic lives on. Just as there are three generations of women in the novel, the book has been embraced by three generations of readers. I''ve met daughters and mothers and grandmothers who have shared the novel, and nothing brings me more joy than to know that Practical Magic is a family affair. This is a book about magic, but more importantly, it''s an ode to sisterhood and family, and to the power of love. Readers have said that when they return to Practical Magic for a second or third reading, they experience the novel in a completely different way than they did the first time around.
The meaning of the book changes for them depending on the stage of their life. The family dynamics are complex; and as often happens in our own lives, how we view the people close to us, even when they are fictional characters, depends on where we stand in the world at that time. Over the years, readers have asked for another novel about the Owens women. My interest in personal history led me to go back in time and write a prequel rather than a sequel. The Rules of Magic tells the story of the aunts from Practical Magic, Franny and Jet, when they are young and first experience their own magical awakenings. I wanted to explore how Franny and Jet became the wise, beloved aunts in Practical Magic . The young Franny is a beautiful red-haired girl, fearless and confident in her powers; the young Jet is wounded in love but still willing to open her heart. The aunts are raised--without any knowledge of their magical family history--in the sixties, a magical and revolutionary time in New York, the time and place I had known as a girl.
It was a pleasure to go back to the sixties and discover how the aunts had lived their lives, both magically and practically. It was also a pleasure for me to return to Greenwich Village as a researcher and revisit the landscape of my own youth. The novelist can be the last to know what a novel is about, and I''m often surprised by the turns in my own stories and by the choices my characters make. Franny and Jet''s brother, Vincent, has a story that neither he nor I would have predicted, one that is at the heart of The Rules of Magic. I start writing a novel with a question I need answered. Practical Magic addresses serious questions about the place of women in our society--questions that are as important, or more so, than they were twenty-five years ago. Unfortunately, over the past quarter century, the place of a woman in society has not moved forward as we had wished, then and now. There are still many of the same issues left to address: equal pay, childcare, healthcare, sexual assault.
Magic may not be able to right these wrongs, but sisterhood just might. The years have only intensified the importance of telling women''s stories, and doing our best to ensure that women who have been forced to be silent can speak and tell their own truths. Fortunately, the Owens women spoke to me. It was as if they had walked through the door and all I had to do was chart their histories. I loved magic from the start, beginning with the stories my Russian grandmother told me. If "magic" was in the title of a book, I was bound to find it. In the world of fairy tales, the amazing is recounted in a matter-of fact tone, with the practical and the magical living side by side. One day there is a knock at the door, or a rose that blooms through the winter, or a spindle that must be avoided at all costs.
It was the melding of the magical and the everyday that was most affecting to me as a reader, for the world I lived in seemed much the same. People you loved could disappear, through death or divorce; they could turn into heroes or beasts. My personal experience and my childhood reading left me longing for a world in which anything could happen, magic or not, on an ordinary day. More and more readers have come to feel that magical literature is the original form of storytelling, including fairy tales, folktales, myth, and modern fiction. If I were to write Practical Magic today, I would begin in exactly the same way as I did twenty-five years ago. For more than two hundred years, the Owens women have been blamed for everything that has gone wrong in town. There are those who have come to the book after watching the film version of Practical Magic , which has become a much loved cult movie and boasts one of the most exceptional casts of women ever gathered: Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, Stockard Channing, Dianne Wiest, Evan Rachel Wood, Camilla Belle, Chloe Webb, and Margo Martindale. It''s a rare film that is so chock-full of interesting female characters who argue, form friendships, hurt one another, and support each other.
The film is great fun, but it doesn''t avoid the darkness in the story: Gillian''s history of abuse resonates, as does Sally''s emotional journey of love and loss, which leads her to understand that the only chance for happiness is to be true to herself. At this writing, I am beginning a third magic book about Maria Owens, Magic Lessons , going even further back in time, charting the initial history of the Owens family and their magical abilities. I can''t wait for readers to discover the origins of the family, and I can''t wait to discover it for myself. The story may surprise me, and I expect it will take on a life of its own, but I know that within it I will find that once upon a time, there was a woman or a girl who was different, who was an outcast, who looked for beauty in the world, who was wounded, who fell in love despite the warnings, who would do anything for her sister or her niece or her daughter or her mother, who knew that despite the dangers, we must fall in love whenever we can. SUPERSTITION For more than two hundred years, the Owens women have been blamed for everything that has gone wrong in town. If a damp spring arrived, if cows in the pasture gave milk that was runny with blood, if a colt died of colic or a baby was born with a red birthmark stamped onto his cheek, everyone believed that fate must have been twisted, at least a little, by those women over on Magnolia Street. It didn''t matter what the problem was--lightning, or locusts, or a death by drowning. It didn''t matter if the situation could be explained by logic, or science, or plain bad luck.
As soon as there was a hint of trouble or the slightest misfortune, people began pointing their fingers and placing blame. Before long they''d convinced themselves that it wasn''t safe to walk past the Owens house after dark, and only the most foolish neighbors would dare to peer over the black wrought-iron fence that circled the yard like a snake. Inside the house there were no clocks and no mirrors and three locks on each and every door. Mice lived under the floorboards and in the walls and often could be found in the dresser drawers, where they ate the embroidered tablecloths, as well as the lacy edges of the linen placemats. Fifteen different sorts of wood had been used for the window seats and the mantels, including golden oak, silver ash, and a peculiarly fragrant cherrywood that gave off.