The long-awaited “Wicked” movie is now in theaters worldwide.
It’s based on the 2003 musical, that’s based on the best-selling 1995 book by Massachusetts resident Gregory Maguire: “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.”
We visited Maguire at his home outside Boston to go back to where it all began — both for his own life and for his trip into the world of Oz.
Maguire was raised in Albany, the middle child in a family of seven siblings.
“Very few kids know when they are very young that they’re going to grow up to be gay or lesbian. And I certainly did not know that myself,” he said. “I was both thronged with loving brothers and sisters, but also isolated by feeling that I was just a little different from them.”
Though he couldn’t quite name the reason why he felt different until his late high school and early college years, he felt it made him feel separate from his siblings, he said.
“I do think that if you are trying to figure out your identity in a crowd of kids…one of the tools for a creative kid is to say, ‘Let me imagine myself somewhere else,’” he said. “Imagination is the elixir of rescue.”
He moved to Boston in the late 1970s to get a master’s degree in children’s literature from Simmons College, then stayed at the university to teach for almost a decade.
Then he shifted his focus into writing books for adults.
“I [made the shift] because the theme in ‘Wicked’ is about the nature of evil,” he said. “And I didn’t think that was an appropriate subject for the kind of child readers who had already climbed into my little community and were looking for the next thing I had written.”
Maguire added that when he came up with the concept of Elphaba’s story, it was in part a way to harness feelings of being slightly ostracized into a character “whose behavior was perhaps stronger and braver and louder than mine, and from whom I could take example about how to be brave and strong in this world.”
He has talked about how he was inspired to write “Wicked” when he was living in London at the start of the first Gulf War and saw a newspaper headline comparing then-Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
“The novel Wicked is now almost 30 years old and at the time that it was published, I felt it’s a bit retro,” he said. “And yet, in the three decades since it first came out, the themes and its concerns seem to have become more and more prevalent.”
In his home is a painting by his husband, artist Andy Newman, called “Consolation: A Study.”
“And it’s really the painting that made me fall in love with him, because it’s so tender,” he said. “And I was so drawn to the sense of compassion demonstrated in that painting that I thought ‘whoever could paint this painting is a very fine person indeed, not just as an artist, but as a person.’”
Maguire met Newman at an art colony called the Blue Mountain Center. Newman was preparing for a show opening in New York and Maguire was writing his second adult novel, “Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister.”
When Massachusetts started recognizing same-sex marriage in 2004, they had been together for about seven years and were raising three adopted children.
“By the time the Commonwealth of Massachusetts approved the legality of such an institution, we already had our three adopted children living in the house with us,” he said. “We waited about five weeks and then we got married in the backyard. The children gave us away and then they took us back at the end of the ceremony.”
Maguire said Elphaba’s greenness and ostracization in the story of “Wicked” are not analogs to his own identity as a gay man.
“They’re analogs to being human. We are all different. We all don’t quite fit into the peg for which others think we are shaped,” he said. “It’s our own business to scrape away the edges of our own peg and make ourselves at home — or to leave the pegboard entirely, find ourselves someplace else to be.”
Produced with assistance from the Public Media Journalists Association Editor Corps funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people.
This story was originally published by GBH News. It was shared as part of the New England News Collaborative.
