If you were enchanted by 2024's smash hit movie “Wicked,” you might enjoy reading Elphaba’s backstory. Author Gregory Maguire, whose book inspired the movie and the musical, spoke with The Culture Show about his new book “Elphie: A Wicked Childhood.”
“I wanted to find out what Elphie’s relationships were like with her sister and with her parents before the days of college brought her into fuller focus for us,” Maguire told The Culture Show host Jared Bowen. “I love biographies more as I get older. In some ways I choose them over fiction now, but I find that I don’t really care so much when Barbra Streisand is telling us about winning her 18th Grammy. I mean, what I really care about is what she was like when she was 12, and how she struggled against her mother and against her absent father…the kinds of things that shape a person who’s going to grow up to be influential are far more interesting to me than actually a tale of what they do when they get famous and powerful.”
“Elphie: A Wicked Childhood” is a coming-of-age story that reveals the events, trauma and relationships that shaped the woman who would go on to become the Wicked Witch of the West. Grappling with an age-old question of nature versus nurture, Elphie investigates the providence of destiny.
“When I wrote ”Wicked“ thirty years ago, I actually included two scenes in which Elphaba was a child… But those scenes had to come out because we needed to gallop ahead and get Elphaba and Glinda to meet each other more quickly. So I took those cuttings out. I put them in the basement like one does a hyacinth bulb, and thirty years later I found that there was still life in them. When I planted them, they began to flourish again.”
Head to
https://gregorymaguire.com/
to learn more about Maguire’s work.
