Witchcraft for Wayward Girls: Grady Hendrix’s captivating tale of power, rebellion, and hidden histories – “I faced a lot of pushback.”

From Grady Hendriz, the author of How to Sell a Haunted House, The Southern Book Club’s Guide To Slaying Vampires and The Final Girl Support Group comes a brand new horror to read this winter with Witchcraft for Wayward Girls.

The book follows pregnant fifteen-year-old Fern who is forced to stay at Wellwood House –  a home for ‘wayward girls’. Loose girls. Girls who grew up too fast. Unwed mothers who are hidden by their families to have their babies in secret, give them up for adoption, and most important of all, forget any of it ever happened.

Set in the sweltering summer of 1970, Fern meets a dozen other girls in the same predicament at Wellwood. Rose, a hippie who insists she’s going to keep her baby and escape to a commune. Zinnia, a budding musician who plans to marry her baby’s father. And Holly, barely fourteen, mute and pregnant by no-one-knows-who.

Every moment of their waking day is strictly controlled by adults who claim they know what’s best for them. Then Fern meets a librarian who gives her an occult book about witchcraft, and power is in the hands of the girls for the first time in their lives. But power can destroy as easily as it creates, and it’s never given freely. There’s always a price to be paid . . . and it’s usually paid in blood.

We spoke to Hendrix about why Witchcraft for Wayward Girls is a very personal story, why witches weren’t even going to feature in the first draft and what he has coming up next…

How did learning about your relatives’ experiences in homes for unwed mothers influence the emotional depth of the novel?

This book kicked my butt up one side of the block and back down the other. Getting the Seventies right, getting pregnancy right, getting the maternity homes right — it was a lot and without a coven of women (and some men) who helped me, shared their birth stories, and answered my intrusive questions I would have been lost. But you’re right — it all goes back to finding out that two of my relatives had been sent away as teenagers, a fact they never discussed until they were in the 70s.

It blew my mind that they had been hidden away like criminals for doing the most natural thing in the world. I read more about the homes to try to wrap my head around it and realised that the homes — where pregnant teenage girls were shamed and hidden — provided a perfect location for a book if I was up to the task. It took me many years to get to a point where I was ready to even attempt writing this one, so I can only hope I didn’t screw it up too badly.

Why did you feel compelled to blend this historical backdrop with the theme of witchcraft?

Originally this was a folk horror novel and the first two drafts didn’t actually feature any witches at all. At which point my editor pointed out that since the word ‘witches’ was in the title, maybe the dramatic tension would increase significantly if there were some actual witches in the book?

Witches have long been associated with childbirth — from the fever dreams of the Malleus Maleficarum decrying witch midwives who murdered babies for Satan, to any number of phony grimoires that claimed baby fat was a key ingredient in witches’ flying ointment, to fairy tale witches who live in candy houses and wait for delicious children to come stumbling along — so it made total sense to have witches feature prominently in a book about childbirth. I was just kind of the last person to figure that out.

Homes for unwed mothers are a sensitive and often overlooked part of history. How did you balance historical accuracy with fictional storytelling?

If anything, Wellwood House is toned down. A lot of women had very, very different experiences in the homes, whose rules and regulations varied greatly based on the state they were in and, especially, the personality of whoever ran them. Some homes confiscated your money and kept prospective mothers practically imprisoned, allowing parents who wanted to adopt their babies to view them from hiding and judge their appearance as if they were race horses at auction.

Other homes gave prospective mothers a lot of freedom and provided them with teachers, social workers, nutritionists, and doctors.

I wanted Wellwood House to fall firmly in the middle, not too extreme in either direction, so that no one could dismiss it as an outlier.

You’ve mentioned how witches defy definition. How did you finally nail down the witches in Witchcraft for Wayward Girls?

That was all thanks to W.I.T.C.H – Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy From Hell, a political action group founded in the Sixties. I read about them and realised that any coven of actual witches in 1970 would have a lot more in common with an underground resistance cell than a spiritual movement, so I started reading a lot of political protest and resistance literature from 1969 and 1970.

At the time, mainstream society was terrified of groups like W.I.T.C.H., the Black Panthers, and the Weather Underground, and rightly so. These groups were responding to the war being waged on them by fighting a war back. So political literature from that era had a huge influence on how my witches operated. I thought of them as feminist terrorists, and you know what they say, “Your terrorist is my freedom fighter.”

How do the protagonists’ personal growth and their embrace of witchcraft intertwine?

Girls who were sent to the homes were totally stripped of power: they could not decide on what to do with their babies, they could not decide on what to do with their own bodies. They were given no information on what was happening to them or what their options were. They weren’t informed of their legal rights. Other people made all their decisions for them. So witchcraft becomes a way for them to find another source of power, a way of fighting back, a way of making decisions for themselves.

But I want to point out that my witches are not guidance counsellors, they’re rebels fighting a system that wants to exterminate them. They’re not here to lead these girls on a journey of self-discovery, they’re not here to hold their hands, they’re not here to give them hugs. They offer the girls power, and they can either seize it, or hide from it, and I don’t know which is the right decision, to be honest.

Also, I want to just say that I’m calling my characters “girls” deliberately because I want people to remember that these women we sent away were girls between the ages of 13 and 20, for the most part. These were our children. They deserved better.

The camaraderie among the girls feels central to the story. How did you go about developing the relationships between Fern, Rose, Zinnia and Holly?

Ann Fessler’s book, The Girls Who Went Away, interviews lots of women who were sent to the homes, and several of them talk about the fact that it was such a relief to be around other women going through the same thing. They speak about how much they watched out for each other and took care of each other. And I think that’s something good to keep in mind: when the world turns its back on you, tells you you’re worthless, and tells you you’re a criminal, then the only people you can rely on are other criminals.

You’ve said that the first drafts didn’t even include witchcraft. How did the story evolve to make it such a central theme?

Once witches entered the picture around draft three it was just a matter of getting my head out of my ass and staying out of their way. If my witches were going to be a radical resistance cell of underground terrorists then I needed to know why they were in Florida, why they’d stop at a home for unwed mothers, what they wanted from these girls, and why that mattered. I faced a lot of pushback because I think cultural gatekeepers don’t love the idea of teenaged girls finding their power by joining forces with a bunch of women who want to drive a car bomb into the patriarchy and don’t see a need to be cute about it. But that also meant that I had to take the witches seriously — like every revolutionary cell they aren’t going to march in lockstep agreement all the time. Some of them believe in violence, others believe in taking power by any means necessary, while others think they need to resist using the methods of their oppressors.

You’ve said that you’ve always wanted to write about libraries. How did you decide upon your librarian in the book, Miss Parcae, and what’s the significance of her being a witch?

The late Sixties and early Seventies saw a wave of books like How To Be a Sensual Witch, Everyday Witchcraft, Sun Signs for Everyone — basically occult manuals you could pick up at any supermarket. Once I knew my book would revolve around one of these cheap paperbacks that actually contained the key to real supernatural power, I realised that the person most likely to give the girls a book would be a librarian. Because that’s what librarians do: they give people the books they need when they need them most. They guard information and get it out in the world where it can do some good.

What are you reading right now?

Right now I’m reading a lot of kids’ books from the Seventies and Eighties like Bless the Beasts and the Children, My Side of the Mountain, The Girl Who Owned a City — books that are essentially about kids ditching adults and fending for themselves and generally doing a better job of it. Kid’s fiction used to be a lot tougher than it is today, and for my next book I want to make sure I maintain that edge. Of course, there’s still the occasional modern book written for kids that blows your hair back. I just read Anne Fine’s 1996 book, The Tulip Touch, for the first time and I’ve rarely come across an angrier howl of rage.

What’s next for you?

As you can probably guess, my next book is about a bunch of kids, and it’s going to be based on my experiences as a Boy Scout back in the Eighties. I’m still amazed we survived the things we got up to in the woods. I feel like Witchcraft was my book about teenaged girls, and now it’s time to see if I can give dirty, brave, feral teenaged boys their moment in the sun.

I may screw it up completely, but I at least need to give it a try.

Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix will be released on 16 January 2025. Pre-order your copy here.