About Alice Hoffman: A Profile

Alice Hoffman is a prolific writer with a bent toward the magical and luminous, and it's easy to imagine her at some fantastical loom, spinning tales of daily life turned to myth. In the real world, though, she works quietly and consistently out of an old Victorian house near Boston that she shares with her husband, two sons, and three dogs.

One early New York Times review said her work had "the quality of folk tale—of amazing events calmly recounted." Countless reviews since then speak of her skill in fusing the mysterious with the practical, the dark with the optimistic. In her novel The River King, she describes a great flood that consumes an entire town: "Whole chimneys floated down Main Street, with some of them still issuing forth smoke." It's the kind of matter-of-fact, Hoffman-esque line that makes a reader do a double-take. Could such a thing really happen? Does it matter?

Hoffman doesn't think so. She is endlessly surprised when people make a fuss over the uncanny aspects of her fiction, and points to pregnancy as a prime example of the fact that life itself is magical. "Magic in fiction is a long tradition," she says. "One of the reasons we like fables and fairy tales is that they're emotionally true, and page-turners at the same time."

Her strong reader base might say that statement summarizes her own work. She is the bestselling author of fifteen novels, one book of short fiction, and five books for children; she also wrote, with her husband, Tom Martin, an average of two screenplays a year for twenty-five years, so it's surprising to hear that this hardworking author grew up with no real ambitions, thinking she might perhaps cut hair for a living. "I'd have cut a lot of hair," she says wryly. "I always have to be doing something—have four things going at once."

Born in 1952 in New York, she grew up in a working-class Long Island town, positioned, as she says, to be a lifelong observer. Her parents divorced when she was eight, at a time when parents did not divorce, and her mother worked at a time when mothers did not work. Though both her parents had attended college, they were the only people in her neighborhood who had, and Hoffman never really considered college as an option for herself. Certainly she did not expect to make words a career. Though she was always writing, she says, "I was a secret writer." So what got her writing for the rest of the world?

Her first job, at age seventeen, was a push in the right direction. She worked, ironically, at the Doubleday factory—publisher of her most recent novel, The Probable Future. "I stayed till lunch and then quit," she says. One morning was enough to show her that eight hours a day in a world where you had to ask permission to go to the bathroom wasn't for her. There is still some wonder in her voice when she says, "I think it was the first time I ever really thought." At the same time, most of the friends she'd grown up with were drowning in serious heroin addictions. "A lot of people were lost." She didn't want to be one of them.

She enrolled in night school at Adelphi University. She's not sure that she would have stayed in college if she'd had to abide by "a lot of rules and regulations. But it was the sixties. One year it was Kent State, and we never finished the semester." She took writing classes and had the good fortune to study with excellent teachers who encouraged her. She left with a degree in English and anthropology, and applied to the Stanford University Creative Writing Center. Not only was she accepted, she was offered, out of the blue, a Mirrielees fellowship. At Stanford, she met Albert Guerard, who became her mentor. Guerard and his wife, the writer Maclin Bocock Guerard, helped her publish her first story in the literary magazine Fiction. Legendary editor Ted Solotaroff then beckoned—did she have a novel? She quickly began to write one. Property Of was published in 1977 when she was twenty-five years old.

Hoffman has enjoyed early and continued success. Her work has been published in more than twenty translations and one hundred foreign editions. Her novels have repeatedly received mention as notable books of the year by The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Library Journal, and other periodicals. Practical Magic was made into a film starring Nicole Kidman. Here on Earth was chosen by Oprah's Book Club. At Risk, a novel about a family coping with a child with AIDS, is on the reading lists of numerous secondary schools and universities.

Yet she says, "I really struggle every time. I have terrible self-doubt. I've had periods where I've had writer's block and then I haven't, and I feel like I've had periods where I've had to learn to write all over again. It took me a long time to be able to tell anyone I was a writer."

And the glamour doesn't attract her. "How do you become a writer if you're interested in all that? Because if you want to be a writer, you want to be alone in a room."

She spends a lot of time alone in a room. But she calls her life normal, and like all normal lives, hers has not been without hardship. For years, she struggled with phobias. It is impossible to read Illumination Night and not feel that you know what it is to suffocate in the bell jar of agoraphobia. Hoffman intersperses third-person narrative with relentless second-person panic, as in this passage of agoraphobic Vonny attempting to board a plane:

Her legs will not move. Her skin is cold. She is not quite sure why but she knows that if she walks into the plane she will die.

 

Your heart is beating much faster than a human heart.

A believer in writing as an act of healing, Hoffman helps her characters find ways to heal, too. By the end of the book, Vonny begins to come out the other side:

When your safe place begins to feel dangerous it can mean your pattern of phobias is breaking down. This can be a sign of recovery . . . one morning you go out and drive back and forth in the driveway. By the time you have made your third run down the driveway you have stopped asking yourself why you have to start all over again. You are simply a woman practicing the art of real life.

Real life is hard life in Hoffman's books, which tend to feature outsiders—strong women, single women, struggling women, children facing danger. Even though she has enjoyed a long marriage and raised two children, she continues to mull on themes that have long preoccupied her. This is natural, she believes. "Very often what you're writing about is what you've experienced as a child."

In Illumination Night, she wrote: "It is terrifying how people can misjudge each other." Years later, Turtle Moon's Lucy reflects: "It hits her, all in a rush, that she may have not been the only one who was unhappy in their marriage—a possibility she has never once considered before."And most recently, The Blue Diary depicts a contented married couple suddenly exposed to the fact that the husband committed a brutal rape fifteen years before. All beg the question: can a person ever completely know another?

"I think it's much easier to know your dog," Hoffman says, quite seriously. In Turtle Moon, an embittered young boy bonds with a dog. When Hoffman writes, "No one has ever known him the way this dog does," you believe her.

It's a line that recognizes that life is uncertain, a fact which was made poignantly clear to Hoffman in 1998 when she learned, after a prolonged period of illnesses and deaths in her family, that she herself had breast cancer. In a 2000 New York Times article entitled "Sustained by Fiction While Facing Life's Facts," she writes of her reaction to the news: "I was certain my doctor was phoning to tell me the biopsy had come back negative. I was absolutely sure of it, but then she said, 'Alice, I'm sorry.' I could hear the concern and sadness in her voice, and I understood that some things are true no matter how and when you're told."

More than ever, she found that writing sustained her during her months of treatment. "When I became too ill to sit up for long, I moved a futon into my office and went from desk to bed, back and forth until the line between dreaming and writing was nothing more than a thin, translucent thread."

She has been healthy since those twilight months of treatment ended. In recent years, she has written for younger readers. She sees a lot of mother-daughter duos at readings, and decided she wanted to write to both generations, because "what you read when you're twelve stays with you in such a deep way."

She also wanted to include her younger son in her writing life, so they wrote a book together. "He's been able to experience the whole process, and how incredibly long it takes," she says. Moondog, by Alice Hoffman and Wolfe Martin, will be published by Scholastic on Halloween 2004.

Besides writing? "What else is there to do? I walk with a friend every morning. I go to the beach, the Cape. Mostly I work, and I always feel like there's not enough time. I always feel like I'm so lucky to be a writer."

That feeling of luck translates into a desire to give back. Years ago, she donated her advance from At Risk to AIDS research and funding for People with AIDS. After September 11, she wrote Green Angel, a kind of apocalyptic fairy tale for young adults. Proceeds benefit the New York Women's Foundation. Proceeds from Local Girls, a collection of interrelated stories, benefit breast cancer.

"I've been lucky," she says. "And I feel like fiction needs to matter in the real world."

The real world, like life in Hoffman's fictions, is uncertain and wondrous and generally resistant to our attempts to control it. But Hoffman herself increasingly embraces all of her worlds. Recently an elderly driver hit the gas instead of the brake and crashed into Hoffman's backyard. "And I thought, Well, this is a message," she says. "Here's someone telling you something. You might as well live."