A Wickedly Beautiful Heart

An interview with Gregory Maguire, the author of the novel that became The Jonathan Bailey Movie, in which we talk about the line between good and evil, childhood grief, faith, belonging, and empathy

Dec 18, 2024

Wednesday, December 18
Grand Rapids, Mich.

Love expresses itself by desiring to know more about its object. So after seeing The Jonathan Bailey Movie (f.k.a. Wicked) two weeks ago, I bought a copy of Wicked, Gregory Maguire’s best-selling 1995 novel, on which the film was based. Spoiler alert: They’re quite different!

“It’s a long book, and it involves real commitment, if not a kind of instinct toward masochism,” Maguire told me when we spoke the other day. It is long, yes—my paperback clocks in at 456 pages—but it’s the kind of novel Maguire enjoys: “If I were a different kind of writer, I could have gone back and pulled the threads tighter, but I really like a baggy novel, a messy novel, a novel that approximates life.”

If you have thus far experienced neither The Jonathan Bailey Movie nor the Tony-winning musical nor the book, then here’s a very short brief: All three explore the backstory of Elphaba, a.k.a. the Wicked Witch of the West, of Wizard of Oz fame.

Maguire recently did a panel discussion with Casey McQuiston, author of the novel Red, White, and Royal Blue, which was made into a 2023 film. “They said it was almost as if the novelist had actually given birth to twins without knowing it, and the twin had been raised in a foreign country and had grown up with a lot of similar DNA but had had different life experiences and so presented in the world in a different way,” he said. “In my case, I have triplets, because there’s the Broadway play and the film.”

In all three Wickeds, Elphaba is the protagonist. But she feels less heroic in the novel—Maguire isn’t much given to heroes—and the border between good and evil seems blurrier and more porous. I suggested to Maguire that it felt as if he were constantly nudging the reader to draw the line not in Sharpie but at best in pencil. He responded that chalk dust, gently blown onto the paper, might be even better. “There are very few distinctions that I strongly make, even about the wizard, whom I despise,” he said. “Even the wizard has his wretched childhood. And he may have a benighted notion that he actually is doing the right thing for the people.”

That fine texture emerged organically during the book’s writing. Maguire doesn’t outline, nor does he pre-plot character development. With Elphaba, “I really thought I was going to write a biographical profile of someone with, you know, a psychopathology or a sociopathic disorder, like Humbert Humbert or one of the great villains of history or Hannibal Lecter—somebody we could commonly consider a monster,” he said. “I did not say, Oh, I’m going to do a makeover on a villain. That was not my ambition.”

He intended to make Elphaba as unappealing as possible. Then he wrote a scene, just a few chapters into the book, in which her childhood household is alive with chatter about the powers that be, and Elphaba’s nanny mentions the possibility of a dragon living beneath Oz. Suddenly, the baby Elphaba roars as if she were a little dragon. “Her green skin made her more persuasive, as if she were a dragon child,” Maguire writes. “She roared again... And she peed on the floor, and sniffed her urine with satisfaction and disgust.”

It’s a startling end to that chapter—and, for Maguire, a crucial beginning. “I meant that to be revolting,” he said. “I meant that to be evidence of a kind of animal-like inhumanity.”

The morning after he wrote it, he was re-reading his previous day’s work, as he always did to get back into the writing. “I saw her putting her face down in her own waste and smiling at it and taking pleasure in it, and I thought to myself, Oh, you poor child. Who are you? Nobody is ever going to get you, are they? And my heart just broke,” he said. “I had to take myself off into executive session in the bathroom, and I said, You have got to get out of her way. You have got to stop trying to use her for your own intellectual ambitions of discovering something about psychopathology. You’ve just got to tell her story and see who she is. You don’t have to rescue her, and you don’t have to criticize her. You just have to follow her like a journalist on the campaign trail: Take notes, and report what you see.”

Empathy is a connective thread throughout both Wicked the book and Wicked the movie. It emerges particularly fiercely in Elphaba’s heart-opening encounter with Dr. Dillamond, a professor who also happens to be a goat. Dr. Dillamond loses his teaching position amidst the growing persecution of animals in an increasingly authoritarian Oz.

That storyline stems from Maguire’s experiences as a gay Catholic. Were it not for the intervention of a friend who had already entered the priesthood, Maguire might have become a priest or a monk too. This friend perceived his writerly gifts and told him, “The church will crush them, and they will make you sacrifice them, and God did not give you such a fund of creative energy in order to ask you to denature it.”

In that counsel, Maguire also heard a word about his sexuality. “God made me gay, and so I had to unpack it for myself and come to terms with it,” he said. Fortunately for him, his “coming to terms” took place against the backdrop of a Church in the midst of opening up, in the 1960s and early 1970s. His home parish, St. Vincent de Paul in Albany, N.Y., was particularly liberal, and his teen years were spent immersed in a congregational context suffused by social-justice concerns. “Questions could be aired without there being a sense of people taking sides and fighting,” he said. “We still lived within the paradigms that had been handed down to us by the generations, by time and tradition. But that and the act of considering how the church could be more expansive and more inclusive were not opposite sides of the coin. They all seemed to be acts of devotion to trying to figure out the movement of God in the world in which we happened to live.”

For Maguire, Galatians 3, where the Apostle Paul writes about there being “neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Jesus Christ,” proved a scriptural key. As he understood the passage, that meant God’s love was for all: “And that had to mean, by extrapolation, that God who created me was also not against me for being gay. He just wasn’t giving me the operating manual. I had to kind of write it for myself, and it was hard—and a lot of people could never forgive how hard it was.”

Maguire counts himself lucky that he had what he calls “the right tools” both to affirm his own sexuality and to hold onto his faith. “I had tools of empathy. I had tools of reflection. I had tools of language,” he said. “I’m sure I also had the tool of needing deeply to belong, because I felt so isolated from so much else in the world that to belong to the Church was a safe haven where, in some ways, I could recognize myself.”

Another tool: stubbornness. He understands why many people have walked away from the church, whether because of theological disagreement or because of the immense harm of the church abuse scandals: “I don’t fault them for it, but my take is, you know, I’m going to be Rosa Parks; I’m not going to give up my seat.”

That seat has history. “This church was given me by my parents, who are all dead now, all three of them, and by their parents, and by many, many people who taught me and raised me and have moved on. That’s my inheritance,” he said. “I would rather stay and be a presence—even an annoying presence—to somebody else in the pew or at the altar. I’m not going to make their life easier by walking away.”

Recognizing another’s discomfort and choosing to let them sit in it—well, that can be an act of empathy, too.

Religion doesn’t figure significantly in the film, but it’s important in the novel. Onscreen, Elphaba’s father is a public official; in the book, he’s a minister and an evangelist.

Maguire’s Oz has four dominant strains of belief: Lurlinism, which is essentially paganism, named for a mythical fairy queen named Lurline; unionism, which is akin to the organized religion of our times, with all the trappings of church but a god with no name; pleasure faithism, which is heavy on spectacle and emphasizes the emotional highs of communal activity; and tiktokism.

When I first read the word “tiktokism,” I had to pause to remind myself that TikTok the app was named in 2017, more than two decades after Maguire’s novel was published. As described by Maguire, Tiktokism “causes us to go into a house of worship and find ourselves unable to turn off our cellphones.” His depiction of a technology-mediated devotion to overstimulation and information that may or may not be reliable feels shockingly, even disturbingly prescient.

“I’m describing a kind of shortcut, almost an easy road, to the connectivity that devotion promises,” Maguire told me. He noted that the English word “religion” is rooted in the Latin religare, which means “to bind” or “to connect.” “We can become addicted to the allure of technology and to the instant gratification of it, and we forget that it is actually designed as a tool and not as an end. That is, I think, my caution—and I’m susceptible to that too. I can lie in bed for 45 minutes and watch, you know, Kristen Chenoweth on YouTube.”1

To the nine children’s books he wrote before Wicked, Maguire has since added six sequels to his blockbuster, 14 more kids’ books, and eight others for adults. In March, thirty years after the publication of the first Wicked book, he will release a new novel, Elphie, a prequel about Elphaba’s childhood: “As Wordsworth famously said, ‘The child is father of the man.’ Well, the child is also mother to the witch.”2 Elphie will give the insider’s view of her childhood, “so that we can see how she is made.”

Elphaba the child is no less complicated than Elphaba the adult—and the rest of us. “There are contradictions, because one can be kind in one moment and even brutal, and thoughtful, and confused, the next—and that’s called childhood,” Maguire said. “That is how we’re made. It’s because we are buffeted about by the storms of all those feelings that we arrive at the shores of our adulthood and decide which way to walk.”

Maguire, the youngest of four kids in an Irish Catholic family, was himself born into a storm of devastation and grief, in 1954. Maguire’s mother died giving birth to him.

At 40, Maguire’s father, who had already suffered a heart attack and was unemployed, sank into a sorrow that clouded his relationship with young Gregory. “I came into the room, and the warmth sort of went down a notch,” Maguire said. “I was a reminder to him of what he’d lost, and I had to live with that.”

Then there was the matter of his siblings. “My arrival on this planet, in this life, deprived my older brother, my other older brother, and my sister of their mother,” he said. “They were eight, five, and three when their mother died and I arrived.”

The force field that partly protected him from his father’s coldness and his brotherly guilt was the ferocious love of Marie, his mother’s childhood best friend. When Gregory was 2, she married Maguire’s father and added the four Maguire kids to her own three with an ardency that Maguire still regards with deep reverence: “She raised us all, out of love for her dead friend. It’s a very Beaches kind of story.” She was scrupulously fair with all seven kids. “Her fierce, ethical even-handedness was exactly the opposite of what we see in ‘Cinderella’ and other stories about second mothers. It was so commendable and such a moral lesson.”

Maguire’s father was no fan of self-reflection; he thought it unmanly. Still, he managed to create a home that Maguire describes as “intellectually oriented, even if very old-fashioned in terms of the practice of their Catholicism. They were intellectually honest and literate. We didn’t talk about anything, but we learned language so that we could actually talk about it to ourselves.”

Maguire spun that gift of language into storytelling. “A lot of my stories deal with the death or disappearance of a parent and how that shapes the protagonist,” he said. “That instinctive self-therapy that I started engaging in when I was about 8, and that I have been doing until now, 62 years, has helped me survive.”

Maguire and his husband, the painter Andy Newman, have three adopted children who are now young adults, and about 18 months ago, after the death of one of his siblings, Maguire paused to consider the arc of his life. “I said to myself, Well, look at me: I have adopted two sons and a daughter, three children who didn’t have a mother, and I have brought them up. I have been their mother, effectively, and I still am.” It was a liberating moment: “I squared my shoulders, and I said to myself, Whatever you have been laboring under your entire life, your debt is paid. You have taken on the moral lesson given you by Marie, and you have learned from her example, and you have paid your ransom, and you are now free of that burden of grief.”

He fell silent for a moment and then said to me: “And you know what? I am. I feel it. I’m changed. I’m 70, and I changed at 68-and-a-half. I put down a yoke I’ve been carrying since I was old enough to understand what a yoke was.”

In the book, Elphaba struggles mightily with forgiveness, both in the giving and in the receiving. I suggested to Maguire that perhaps he had been able to extend himself some of the forgiveness that his protagonist keeps at a distance.

“I don’t even know if I extended it,” he said. “Maybe it was extended to me.”

As Maguire has re-examined his book, he has come to a couple of conclusions that he didn’t have when it was first released.

First, “I didn’t realize at the time that it is about how to be a citizen. Elphaba is learning how to be a citizen.” To be a member of society, at once autonomous and connected, “is to be pulled in contrary directions. We are pulled to recognize our individual experiences, which we claim the right to own and honor—and which we ask to be honored for. At the same time, to be a citizen is to be asked to subsume some of our individuality on behalf of the greater good—the good of the polis. And I don’t think I realized that that was part of what gave Elphaba’s life such strain.”

Secondly, Maguire believes his book does an uncommon thing by wrestling with what he sees as humanity’s deep-seated desire to do good. “Once you reach the age of seven, you don’t want to be a good boy; you want to be a bad boy. There are very few stories about wanting to be good and wanting to do good,” he says. “Yet I think the instinct to wake up in the morning and to want to do no harm and to want to be helpful is part of who we are.”

Every one of Wicked’s complicated characters seems to want to do good, even if that desire sometimes is unleashed in spectacularly awful fashion, and the book compels the reader to navigate the grays (and, I guess, the greens) in ways that the film, with all its Technicolor dazzle, cannot. As Maguire and I talked, I got the feeling that he was almost allergic to binaries. Perhaps it’s precisely Maguire’s unwillingness to live comfortably in the either/or that not only empowered him to write Wicked but also enabled him to thrive as a human. As a writer who is a gay person of faith myself, I’m especially thankful for elders like him.

In a recent essay, Maguire wrote that, in his youth, as he was wrestling with a budding awareness of his sexuality, he wondered: “Was it for this that my mother had died, that I should grow up queer, twisted, defective? What a cruel joke.” Here he is, decades on, proudly gay and still a person of faith. How? “I try to be a person of faith—and I’m also a person of doubt,” he told me. “I admit to ignorance about how the world was made and who made it. And that allows me to be a person of faith and a person of doubt at the same time.”

His both/and—resisting binaries again!—got me thinking about “Defying Gravity,” the movie-ending anthem that is so powerfully sung by Cynthia Erivo. (The phrase “defying gravity” actually appears nowhere in Maguire’s book.) “I'm through accepting limits/ ’Cause someone says they’re so,” Elphaba sings. “Some things I cannot change/ but till I try, I’ll never know.”

I mentioned a much-discussed meme that has emerged since the film’s release, thanks to a question a journalist asked Erivo about “holding space with the lyrics of ‘Defying Gravity.’” I confessed I didn’t actually understand the meme, but maybe the mystery was invitational. Maguire admitted he hadn’t even heard about that meme—“I’m really not up on memes”—but he was nonetheless game to talk it out.

Perhaps holding space, he mused, could mean holding onto hope—particularly hope that defies those naysayers “who say we must be either this or that.” “The instinct to be scared of ambiguity, to be resistant to contingency, is a real threat,” he said. “It’s a real threat to community, and it’s a real threat to the individual soul. Maybe our salvation is in holding space—in considering, and in taking time, and in being tolerant, including with ourselves.”

That sounds like a kind of saving grace to me.

A longer letter than usual this week, I know, but I wanted you all to experience as much of the goodness of being with Gregory Maguire as I did when I spoke to him. You can read more about him on his website and follow him on Instagram.

As always, I’d love to know what you think. What’s on your heart and mind?

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