Alice Hoffman

American novelist

Date of Birth	:	03 Feb, 2002
Place of Birth	:	New York, NY
Profession	:	Novelist, Writer
Nationality	:	American

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.

Early Life

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."