The cover of Witchcraft for rebellious girls (Minotaur), by the American writer Grady Hendrix (52 years old), seems to have come out of a novel for teenagers. It has a lava lamp surrounded by butterflies and a sticker that says “Limited edition. Glows in the dark.” The text promises to be a horror story, with witches and fiction, but the greatest terror is what the United States experienced between 1945 and 1973, the year in which abortion became legal in that country. During the call it was Scoops for children There was an increase in pregnancies outside of marriage and, with this, the forced entry of teenage mothers into foster families – generally with religious values - also skyrocketed, to the point of giving birth and taking their children away to give them up for adoption. This was not an isolated event. For example, in Spain the same practices existed in the Royal Council for the Protection of Women during Franco’s regime, and in Latin America dictatorships gave children born in political prison up for adoption. The story of Fern, Rose, Holly and Zinnie, the protagonists of the book, is the same as that of many women who are still looking for their children.
At the Hotel Casa de las Artes, in the Atocha neighborhood of Madrid, Hendrix is in excellent spirits after the news that New York, where he lives, has elected a new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, a socialist and Muslim. “It’s a relief that he won, otherwise it would have been terrible,” he exults. The writer of works such as We sold our souls AND Book club guide to killing vampires He is known for using terror, humor and social criticism as a formula for telling his stories.
While Witchcraft for rebellious girls It’s a work of fiction, it’s much closer to reality than it seems. In fact, she decided to write it when she discovered that two of her relatives had passed through one of the shelters for pregnant teenagers. 50 years later, one of them found the son who had been taken away from her. The other one isn’t. “When I heard about her experiences, I read the only book on the subject, by Ann Fessler (Girls who are gone), and I said ‘here’s a story.'” But he says he didn’t feel ready to write it, nor did he think he was ready when he began the manuscript in 2022.
Being a man and not having children, he decided to prepare himself to correctly tell the story of pregnant, abandoned and frightened teenagers: “I spoke with 12 women who shared their story with me and allowed me to ask them very personal questions. I also spoke with three midwives, I took a course online about childbirth and I read a lot.” From all this was born a book of almost 500 pages that tells the story of one of these houses in Florida, in 1970, and how four of its inhabitants turn to witchcraft to seek justice for what was done to them.
Although the protagonists are isolated from the world, the writer intertwines their stories with that of the United States. Talk about Richard Nixon, the Vietnam War, Charles Manson and the hippies which must have been in the forests, from television programs of the time. We talk about women’s rights and how unmarried and pregnant teenagers were condemned as if they were the worst of the worst. On the first page of the book, real quotes in the media of different eras are told: “The average single mother is a retarded young woman who received an inadequate education at home as a child, due to her parents’ ignorance, poverty and alcoholism.” “Your soul ceases to belong to you when you give birth to a child without a marriage certificate.” “For a single mother, it is a huge learning experience to give up her child for his own good. She has learned an important human value. She has learned to pay the price for her bad deed.” “Behind the national statistics certifying the increase in adolescents giving birth, a disconcerting question remains unanswered: why do adolescents allow themselves to be impregnated?” Hendrix believes that this view has not yet changed, that as a society “we hated them then and we hate them now” and that they are still responsible for everything. “It doesn’t talk about the men, the father, the rape, the abuse, the sexual education. It simply says that what they did was wrong and that they should be ashamed.”
An example of the brutality of what happened then is that the first 150 pages contain no fantastic elements: “I had to find a balance between witches and real horror, because in the end the terror of life is enormous and can surpass even the fantastic.” But they were necessary, she says, because in real life for girls like them there was no happy ending, no way out, no freedom. For him, the witches give hope to this story.
I am against any form of censorship, but I hope my book gets censored because I know it won’t work.
Grand Hendrix, author of “Witchcraft for Wayward Girls.”
Witchcraft for rebellious girls It is published in a context in which conservatism is advancing, women’s rights are in danger, while the US government bans books in public schools. “I am against any form of censorship, but I hope my book will be censored because I know it won’t work,” says Hendrix, and assures that, as long as they ban their reading in schools, students will be more interested in them and will look for them in public libraries. And there, he says, librarians will resist. “I only had to deal with one protest against this book. It was in Alabama. The public library where I was going got about 250 emails, but the staff didn’t care.” On the day of the presentation there were no protests and, in fact, the tickets were sold out. “I think the librarians are doing a fantastic job, they’re managing it wonderfully. As long as there are librarians we’ll be safe.”
He had a hard time working with the idea of witches, but watching the story helped him. He was reminded of the United States of the 1970s, he says, where the country seemed torn by a war between the old and the young. “Young people saw how their peers were sent to Vietnam or shot in the streets during demonstrations and the elderly celebrated it. For their part, the elderly saw how young people protested or had sex and thought they would destroy the country.” He then focuses on the social movements of the time: Black Panthers, Weather Underground, Students Against The War. “I realized that those clandestine revolutionary organizations really sounded like a witch, how she spoke or expressed herself, right? Revolutionary, clandestine, and at war with the world.”
The writer can’t identify who the witches of today are, but it’s clear that we desperately need them, and he has an intuition that perhaps it’s the older women – the harpy witches, he calls them – who are coming to the forefront to stand up for what’s right: “I think they’re the ones who are stepping up. Maybe, once again, it will be the harpy who ends up saving us.”
