AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Grady Hendrix's latest novel starts with the most universal of story invitations.
GRADY HENDRIX: (Reading) Sit. Listen.
RASCOE: Sounds cozy enough, but then just a few lines later...
HENDRIX: (Reading) We've been taught that the devil was the worst thing in the world, but we were too young to understand that there were worse things than the devil.
RASCOE: Now, given that Grady Hendrix's past horror novels have featured demonic possession, vampires, a haunted house, you might think that the devil will show up in this newest one, "Witchcraft For Wayward Girls." And you might think it's the witches who are worse than the devil. Maybe they are. Maybe they're not. I'm joined now by Grady Hendrix to talk about his new book. Welcome to the program.
HENDRIX: Thanks a lot, Ayesha. Nice to meet you.
RASCOE: OK, so set this up for us. The story starts in the early 1970s with a pregnant girl, her very angry father at the wheel. They're speeding from Alabama to Florida. Tell us who the girl is and where her father is taking her.
HENDRIX: Her name is Neva. She's 15, and she's being taken to a maternity home in Florida. And there were about 190 of these across America in - you know, they were around for a long time, but their peak was really from about 1940, '45, to 1973 with Roe v. Wade. And this is where if your daughter got pregnant and didn't have a ring on her finger, you would send her. She'd spend the last trimester usually of her pregnancy in hiding, have her baby. Her baby would be taken from her and put up for adoption. And she'd return home with some kind of cover story. You tell the family or the neighbors, oh, she, you know, visited her aunt this summer, or she went to work on her French in Chicago. And she would be expected to never talk about or think about her baby again.
RASCOE: And the girls were kept under very tight control. Like, the woman running the place where Neva ends up - she instructs the girls, they are not to talk about their real identities. They're given fake names so that Neva - in the book, we come to know her as Fern.
HENDRIX: Right.
RASCOE: And they are also kept in the dark about what exactly is going to happen to them when it's time to give birth. They're told, oh, there's no pain. You'll just go on to sleep. You won't remember anything. That's not true (laughter).
HENDRIX: Yeah. Well, you know, the homes were run by - you know, the Catholic charities ran homes, the Florence Crittenton Homes, the Salvation Army. There were independent homes. And they all varied in how they treated the girls. I mean, you had homes that had nutritionists and obstetricians on staff, who gave them classroom teaching, who had social workers. And then you had homes that were almost like prisons, where the girls' money was taken from them. They were kept indoors all day.
And - but the few common things between the homes is, yes, you never used your real name. You never said where you were from. And you were kept ignorant. You know, all these girls had these due dates bearing down on them like freight trains, and they were dying to know what's gonna happen. And -people say, oh, don't worry about it. That's none of your business when, you know, it's kind of entirely their business.
RASCOE: There are obviously birth scenes in this book, and they are - they're not for the squeamish, we should say.
HENDRIX: Well, isn't birth not for the squeamish?
RASCOE: It's not. No. I've done it. And I have to tell you, it's the best thing in the world, but it's also extremely terrifying. And so you talked about researching. Were you surprised or shocked by some of the things you learned about hospital births, especially back then?
HENDRIX: I mean, listen, giving birth in 1970 - my hat is off to any woman who did that because - they should get a medal of honor. You know, I had OBs telling these stories about doctors who would induce labor if their patient came in on Friday 'cause, eh, they didn't want to mess up their weekend waiting around for her to give birth. Girls like this who gave birth, as one OB pointed out to me, would probably just be knocked out because the doctor really didn't want to mess around with them too much and have to, quote-unquote, deal with them."
You know, and even reading things - like the "Williams Obstetrics Manual," Guttmacher's "Family Planning," which was sort of the go-tos at the time - the attitude towards things like morning sickness - that's all in a woman's mind. That's just a made-up problem. I mean, it really was eye-opening in all the worst ways.
RASCOE: You know, the novel's going along. It's all very realistic. But then here comes this bookmobile and a mysterious librarian and this spellbook for groovy witches. You know, things do get rough. Which is the witches. They're gonna do witchy things, and there's always a price to pay for power. But it really seems here that more of the horror in this book is the reality that the girls are living in.
HENDRIX: Yeah.
RASCOE: What kind of led you to write this kind of story?
HENDRIX: So when I was in my 20s, I found out that two members of my family had been sent away to maternity homes, and they were both in their 60s or 70s now, and they'd never talked about it. And so I was sort of thinking about that for a while and really wrestling with it and trying to figure out, what was that like? Why was this OK? And I read a book by a woman named Ann Fessler called "The Girls Who Went Away," and she lets the mothers talk about their experiences. And, I mean, the fact that these were kids and they were 14 and 15 and 13 years old, and we were telling them, give up your baby, never think about it again. I mean, that's impossible for a mother to do.
RASCOE: Yeah.
HENDRIX: And just the...
RASCOE: Yeah.
HENDRIX: ...Cruelty of it really sort of made me think, there's something here.
RASCOE: Obviously, you look at this, and you think about, like, what is the evil in this book? These teenage girls put into these positions to make these impossible decisions without all the information, without any real adult guidance - like, is that the real evil in this story?
HENDRIX: You know, it's funny. I thought about this a lot, right? I write horror novels. And in writing this, I was like, well, who are my bad guys? Who are my bad guys? Like, well, it can't be the witches. I mean, the witches are scary. But the witches are also offering knowledge and liberation. I thought, well, is it the people running the homes? And I thought, no, you know, the people running the homes were really convinced they were doing what was best for these girls.
Is it the - who's got pregnant? No, of course it's not these girls who got pregnant. Some of them were date raped. Some of them were molested. Some of them just didn't even know what birth control was or have access to it. It's one of those stories where there isn't a villain. There are just a lot of people who were really convinced that they were right, and that conviction did so much damage to so many millions of people.
RASCOE: I wanted to ask you, is it true that, in addition to, you know, being the celebrated author, that you worked in the library of the American Society for - is it psychical?
HENDRIX: Psychical Research.
RASCOE: Psychical Research - what is that? What was that like?
HENDRIX: So the ASPR was founded about 1885, and it was really designed to sort of - there were a lot of mediums doing, you know, these sittings where they'd be conjuring up spirits of the dead and having seances and things, and they were like, is this real? And they wanted to investigate it in a scientific way. I just answered an ad on Craigslist looking for an office manager and wound up there.
And they were like, OK, you know, one of your jobs is answering the phones. And so largely, what I did was listen to people tell me these stories about their lives. I mean, they were about ghosts and time slips and haunted houses and, you know, psychic vampires and things, but they were also really personal stories that were just dressed up in these Halloween costumes. I liked to talk, and it taught me how to shut up and listen.
RASCOE: You get any ideas from that time? And I guess, if not, well, how do you come up with your ideas?
HENDRIX: Man, they're everywhere. One of the reasons I write horror is because it's about the world around us. It's not about space or another planet or a fantasy world or the far future. It's usually about the here and now. And good God, there are so many stories, you know, if you're just willing to listen. And then once you add in that, like, you can make it not boring by throwing in a vampire or some witches or a werewolf or two. I mean, I wish I could keep up with how many books I want to write.
RASCOE: That's Grady Hendrix. His new novel is "Witchcraft For Wayward Girls." Thank you so much for talking with us today.
HENDRIX: Oh, man. Thanks so much for having me.
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