The world couldn’t get enough of Wicked when the blockbuster movie starring Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo premiered in November 2024. Based on the smash Broadway musical, the origin stories of the Witches of Oz once again became a pop culture phenomenon — and the film’s soundtrack produced some of the biggest earworms of the holiday season.
But author Gregory Maguire, whose 1995 novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West inspired both adaptations, still remains in awe of the impact of his book.
“When I published Wicked 30 years ago this year, I really thought it was a one-off, as the British say. One and done, done and dusted,” the author tells PEOPLE. “However, as the world continued to complicate itself and perplex me, I found I needed to go back to Oz for my own mental health…[it] allows me to remain functional.”
In his new novel Elphie: A Wicked Childhood, out March 25 from William Morrow, Maguire takes readers back to Elphaba’s early childhood, before she met Glinda at Shiz University. The novel recounts her family life in Oz, where she was raised alongside siblings Nessarose and Shell, along with her earliest encounters with the land’s Animal population — the latter a passion that fuels Elphaba in her college years.
Maguire, who has written multiple books within the Wicked universe, says that Elphie has been in the making for years. He wrote pages about Elphaba’s youth but had to cut them from the original novel for length; Elphie allowed him to explore the backstory he couldn’t include.
“We’d like to know how our heroes come into the world,” Maguire says. “I had to put in about the birth of Elphaba because it was important and it predicted a lot of what would happen to her. What happens to us in childhood and how we deal with it is illustrative of the kind of character we have to work with for the rest of our lives.”
Despite decades having passed since Maguire first published Wicked, it wasn’t a challenge for the author to return to Oz.
“I only had to write the first page, about her sitting on a blanket on the edge of a river in Quadling Country, before I felt I had slipped right back to sit next to her, to put my arm around her and almost to be her,” he says. “I found that since she is part of me, I am part of her too. The minute I turned my attention to her, I was right back there.”
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The writing process also helped Maguire to further develop Elphaba’s connection with other characters, like her sister Nessarose, who she has a tumultuous relationship with in Wicked.
“I found that there was more resentment of Nessarose in Elphaba’s young childhood, and more sympathy as she began to grow into being a moral creature through her childhood,” he says. “I was delighted that the close bond of Elphaba with her sister was apparent to me.”
The middle child of seven, Maguire’s family had their own connection to the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, adapted from L. Frank Baum’s 1900 children’s novel. Though his parents were “dubious” about watching television in the house, they allowed Maguire and his siblings to view the Judy Garland-led film once a year when it came on national broadcast. Maguire, an avid reader of fantasy stories as a kid, was always struck by the Wicked Witch, played by Margaret Hamilton.
“She seemed like the most genuine item on a supermarket shelf,” Maguire says. “It almost seemed like she was the only one who wasn’t acting.” Creating Elphaba’s character also allowed Maguire to showcase some of their “psychological” similarities too.
“Elphaba brings many of my characteristics to a sharper fruition than I’ve been able to do in my own life,” the author says. “I think I’m reasonably sharp and I think I’m reasonably kind, but I’m not as strong. And if I am moral, I’m also more cautious. Elphaba is not so cautious and she strives into situations and takes a certain amount of charge of them, more briskly than I’ve ever done.”
Maguire’s connection to Wicked also made seeing the 2024 adaptation a memorable, and emotional, experience. Though the author chose not to be involved in the film’s creative process, he cried through the whole movie when he attended the Hollywood premiere alongside his family.
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“I am enormously proud of it,” Maguire says. He’s also quick to recognize the talent of the four actresses who’ve brought Elphaba and Glinda to life: Grande and Erivo, as well as Idina Menzel and Kirstin Chenoweth, who originated the characters on Broadway.
“The times that I have run into them, I feel like they’re my first cousins,” Maguire says. “They are so extraordinarily warm … we fall upon each other as if we’ve known each other our whole lives.”
With the film’s sequel, Wicked: For Good, set to release on Nov. 21, fans are sure to be thinking about Elphaba’s trials once again. Though Maguire hasn’t officially confirmed any more books set in Oz, he says the idea isn’t completely off the table.
“I never know what my subconscious is going to wake me up in the middle of the night and say,” he notes. But one thing Maguire does know for certain is the impact his story continues to have.
“The notion that there are people crawling around on this planet who are grown ups, for whom the story of Wicked is part of their childhood, as the story of Wizard of Oz is part of mine — it does make me feel a little bit like Rip Van Winkle,” he jokes. “I’m Rip Van Wicked, is how I feel right now.”
Elphie: A Wicked Childhood is now available, wherever books are sold.
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