Writing His Way Home

Gregory Maguire's Orphan Soul

by William Patrick, August 24, 2007

Like the disadvantaged tooth fairy in his latest novel, hatched parentless in an old tin can, Gregory Maguire had a rough start. His mother died when he was born, and his father, widowed and unable to care for the three children he already had, placed the newborn in a Catholic orphanage in Albany. There Maguire stayed for some two years until his father recovered, remarried, and was able to collect his children back together.

So it comes as no great surprise that the related concepts of being orphaned and homeless—of feeling abandoned and always in search of one’s place in the world—are main concerns for many of the author’s characters. Orphans, stepchildren, and home-seekers pop up everywhere in Maguire’s books, juvenile and adult. In Missing Sisters, his children’s book from 1994, he tells of Alice Colossus, a 12-year-old orphan who learns she has an identical twin sister who lives in a nice house with loving parents, and sneaks away from the orphanage to find the family she has been denied. Lost, a modern-day adult ghost story that crosses A Christmas Carol with Alice in Wonderland and Jack the Ripper, features heroine and Maguire alter-ego Winifred Rudge, who sets off on a fateful journey to her lost ancestral home in London. Stepchildren are forced into appalling situations with cruel stepmothers in two of Maguire’s adult novels: Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, his revisionist Cinderella tale set in tulip-crazed, 17th-century Holland, and Mirror Mirror, in which a Snow White replacement is threatened by Lucrezia Borgia.

Maguire’s most famous book, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, is a study of evil set against our nostalgia for the The Wizard of Oz and Dorothy Gale, the Kansas orphan trying desperately to get home again. That tale has sold more than two million copies and been adapted into a hit Broadway musical.

Given the themes of his books, you’d think Maguire’s childhood was a nightmare, but in fact he remembers it as being a generally happy one. After he rejoined his three siblings, he lived in a middle-class neighborhood in Albany, and his family grew as his father and stepmother had three more children. His parents, who had grown up during the Depression, scrimped by giving the children hand-me-downs and home haircuts. Yet his parents were generous when it came to encouraging reading. His father was a journalist, his stepmother a poet, and Maguire remembers a house filled with books and a dictionary always on the kitchen table in case someone wanted to look up a word during a conversation.