witchcraft for wayward girls
"Maybe being a witch means you go to Hell but I don't mind if it means I don't have to go home."
I just finished reading my fifteenth book of the year, Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix. An English professor once recommended his books to me and I've been going through his backlog off and on for a couple of years. WFWG is the most visceral book I have read so far from him, being graphic and nauseating enough that I had to put the book down for a couple of days at one point. Yeah, this is a rough one to read if you have tokophobia - just a heads up!
It's 1970, and fifteen-year-old Fern is pregnant and scared. She's spending the last few months of her pregnancy at Wellwood House, a place for teenage girls in the same predicament. Here, they are apart from their families and friends, ensuring that the shame of their actions is theirs alone to carry. Fern's only objective here is to carry to term and deliver her baby so that it may be adopted out to a Good Proper Married Couple. After birthing the baby and recovering, she'll be permitted to go back home and rejoin her real life. Her sins will be washed away, and nobody will know what happened at Wellwood House.
Not every girl's situation is the same, of course. Rose dreams of keeping her baby and running away with her, just the two of them. Zinnia and her boyfriend want to get married someday. Holly is the youngest at fourteen years old, and she is mute, leaving everyone unsure of what her story is.
This book occasionally made my heart hurt. Some of the staff at the Wellwood House were manipulative and looked down on the girls, treating them with unabashed scorn and disgust. After all, what can teenage girls do right? What can they do that won't put them on the receiving end of criticism, derision, mockery, or judgment? These girls are reminded that they are stupid and immoral, and the adults repeatedly state that this - their exile to Wellwood House, their physical discomfort of pregnancy, the shame they must face - is the consequence of their actions and behaviors.
Still, each girl finds friendship and community during her stay. After all, if you're a pregnant teenage girl surrounded by other pregnant teenage girls, you're not so much of an outsider anymore. The girls bum cigarettes off each other, brush each other's hair, and help shave their legs if a girl is too big to bend over and shave comfortably. They look out for each other and take care of each other, because they're all in the same boat.
A lot of the horror in this book comes from subjects like not having a say over what is done to your own body, being unaware of the physical process of giving birth, and experiencing traumatic birth. I think it's interesting that in a book with witchcraft, the most sickening and horrifying things are the things that are real, the things that happen every single day.
The last thing I want to touch on is a rule at Wellwood House: Don't tell anyone your real name or any identifying information about your real life. Every girl is given an alias when they arrive. It's supposed to maintain the anonymity between girls so after they've delivered their baby and are able to return to their normal lives, they leave their Wellwood selves behind.
Have you ever been hospitalized in a shared space with another patient? You're admitted one day and you have to learn the rules and routines of your new environment. You get used to seeing certain faces and learning a bit of their stories, and you begin recognizing regular staff. As patients are discharged, we go back to our everyday lives, leaving people, experiences, and memories in that space. As I read Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, I was reminded of when I was hospitalized as a teenager. I still remember some of the more friendly patients who were admitted around the same time I was, and how comforted I was by those interactions. And then, one day, I was discharged and sent back to my normal life.