Grady Hendrix
Appearances
Up First from NPR
The Girls Who Were Sent Away
Yeah, I mean, I think we're all told as teenagers, even as adults to some extent, here's the path. Follow the path and everything will be fine. You won't have to worry about anything. And I think most of us know that that's just not true. And then I looked at these witches who were sort of the counterpoint to that. And what really inspired my witches was less...
Up First from NPR
The Girls Who Were Sent Away
sort of Wicca or paganism and much more. I sort of found the voice of the witches in political action literature of the late 60s and early 70s, which was a group known as Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, all these groups that said, we are at war with the mainstream because the mainstream is leading us down a path of destruction.
Up First from NPR
The Girls Who Were Sent Away
And all these groups have these same internal debates, you know, Is violence justified? How far can we push things? If we're at war with the mainstream society, what does that look like? What are we allowed to do? And I think it's one thing to say, hey, I'm going off to join the Liberation Army.
Up First from NPR
The Girls Who Were Sent Away
I think it's another thing to say, I'm never going home again, and I will live under an assumed name, and I will be on the run for the rest of my life. You know, it's scary. So, I mean, I think these girls are presented with two... choices, and one looks very scary, and the other looks very safe, and they're both equally dangerous.
Up First from NPR
The Girls Who Were Sent Away
man, they're everywhere. You know, I mean, the world is, one of the reasons I write horror is because it's about the world around us. It's not about space or another planet or a fantasy world or the far future. It's usually about the here and now and people around us. And good God, there's so many stories, you know, if you're just willing to listen.
Up First from NPR
The Girls Who Were Sent Away
And then once you add in that, like, you can make it not boring by throwing in a vampire or some witches or a werewolf or two, I mean, I wish I could keep up with how many books I want to write.
Up First from NPR
The Girls Who Were Sent Away
Her name is Neva. She's 15 and she's pregnant. And she's being taken to a maternity home in Florida. And there were about 190 of these across America. You know, they were around for a long time, but their peak was really from about 1940, 45 to 1973 when Roe versus Wade passed. And this is where if your daughter got pregnant and didn't have a ring on her finger... you would send her.
Up First from NPR
The Girls Who Were Sent Away
She'd spend the last trimester, usually, of her pregnancy in hiding, have her baby. Her baby would be taken from her and put up for adoption. And she'd return home with some kind of cover story you tell the family or the neighbors. Oh, she, you know, visited her aunt this summer or she went to work on her French in Chicago.
Up First from NPR
The Girls Who Were Sent Away
And she would be expected to never talk about or think about her baby again.
Up First from NPR
The Girls Who Were Sent Away
Yeah, well, you know, the homes were run by, you know, the Catholic Charities ran homes, the Florence Crittenden homes, the Salvation Army, they were independent homes. And they all varied in how they treated the girls. I mean, you had homes that had nutritionists and obstetricians on staff who gave them classroom teaching, who had social workers.
Up First from NPR
The Girls Who Were Sent Away
And then you had homes that were almost like prisons. Money was taken from them. They were kept indoors all day. But the few common things between the Holmeses, yes, you never used a real name. You never said where you were from. And you were kept ignorant. You know, all these girls had these due dates bearing down on them like freight trains, and they were dying to know what's going to happen.
Up First from NPR
The Girls Who Were Sent Away
And people say, oh, don't worry about it. That's none of your business when, you know, it's kind of entirely their business.
Up First from NPR
The Girls Who Were Sent Away
Yes, well, you know, these girls are so hungry for information. And who gives people information but librarians? And in the late 60s and early 70s, it was a glut of these sort of supermarket paperbacks of, you know, everyday spells and how to cast charms and how to be a sensual witch.
Up First from NPR
The Girls Who Were Sent Away
And I thought, well, what if a librarian gave them one of these books that actually gave them what they want, which is some power and control over their lives? What if one of these books really did teach them how to do witchcraft? And, you know, as they say, be careful what you wish for.
Up First from NPR
The Girls Who Were Sent Away
Well, two things, really. I mean, one was, so when I was in my 20s, I found out that two members of my family had been sent away to maternity homes. And they were both in their 60s or 70s. Now, they never talked about it. And it kind of blew my mind, the idea that these women I loved very much had children. And... were expected not to know them or see them or think about them.
Up First from NPR
The Girls Who Were Sent Away
And for all they knew, their kids were dead or maybe they were alive or maybe they hated them or maybe they had forgiven them, but they had no idea. And so I was sort of thinking about that for a while and really wrestling with it and trying to figure out what was that like? Why was this okay?
Up First from NPR
The Girls Who Were Sent Away
And I read a book by a woman named Ann Fessler called The Girls Who Went Away, which is, there's very few books written about the Holmes. I mean- Anne's book and Ricky Sollinger's Wake Up Little Susie are kind of the only two. And Anne Fessler's book is an oral history of the homes, and she lets the mothers talk about their experiences. And I was really blown away.
Up First from NPR
The Girls Who Were Sent Away
I mean, the fact that millions of kids were born in these homes And that these were kids, you know, these were girls and they were 14 and 15 and 13 years old. And we were telling them, give up your baby. Never think about it again. I mean, that's impossible for a mother to do. And just the cruelty of it. really sort of made me think there's something here.
Up First from NPR
The Girls Who Were Sent Away
And it took me years until I was sort of like, okay, I'm going to try this book. And then it took me two years to write it while my editor and I fought over a lot of it. And I failed to write it several times and things just sort of went off the rails. But yeah, so that's what I was thinking to get me here.
Up First from NPR
The Girls Who Were Sent Away
Right? Yeah, I mean, you know, and also I need to say, you know, I am a childless middle-aged man. I have no place writing a book in which every character is a pregnant teenage girl. And so I had about 12 moms who really shared their birth stories. I mean, they let me ask stupid questions.
Up First from NPR
The Girls Who Were Sent Away
I had about four OBs and laborists who worked with me, both men and women, who I would just keep coming back to. Okay, what's it? And, you know, they really guided me through this. And so a lot of the time writing this book was trying to get that part of it right.
Up First from NPR
The Girls Who Were Sent Away
Oh, sure. I mean, listen, giving birth in 1970, my hat is off to any woman who did that because they should get a medal of honor. You know, I had OBs telling me stories about doctors who would induce labor if their patient came in on Friday because they didn't want to mess up their weekend waiting around for her to give birth.
Up First from NPR
The Girls Who Were Sent Away
You know, women were regularly tied down at that point when they gave birth. Girls like this who gave birth, as one OB pointed out to me, would probably just be knocked out because the doctor really didn't want to mess around with them too much and have to, quote unquote, deal with them.
Up First from NPR
The Girls Who Were Sent Away
So even reading things like the Williams Obstetrics Manual, Gutmacher's Family Planning, which was sort of the go-tos at the time, the attitude towards things like morning sickness, That's all in a woman's mind. That's just a made-up problem because a woman is uncomfortable with giving birth, and so she's nauseated by it.
Up First from NPR
The Girls Who Were Sent Away
And if she gets comfortable with the idea of her pregnancy, it'll just go away. I mean, it really was eye-opening in all the worst ways. But one doctor said something to me that really informed how I wanted to approach the birth scenes in this.
Up First from NPR
The Girls Who Were Sent Away
It was a doctor I've known for a long time, and she was telling me about her OB rotations in the 90s and, you know, really harrowing stories, the kind of, you know, war stories that just left my jaw on the floor. And at the end of our interview, she said something that really stuck with me. She said, you know, I've been in the room for... I don't know, close to 90 live births.
Up First from NPR
The Girls Who Were Sent Away
And she said in every single one of them is a goddamn miracle. Something happens there that we don't have words for. And that really stuck with me and was kind of what I wanted to capture. Yes, it's horrifying. Yes, it's painful. Yes, it's intense. But this is everything. You know what I mean? This is where we all start. You know, there are two people in a room and then there are three.
Up First from NPR
The Girls Who Were Sent Away
Yeah, so I'm from Charleston, South Carolina. I've done some research down in the Sea Islands. I helped someone write a book many years ago that had some hoodoo in it. And I just kept researching because it was this amazing tradition. You know, voodoo and hoodoo often get confused, but they're very different.
Up First from NPR
The Girls Who Were Sent Away
I mean, voodoo has gods involved and the loa, and hoodoo is very much about medicine and root work and charms and healing. And and so it was this tradition that I worry is going to get lost. And it's a really intense part of sort of that Sea Island, you know, South Carolina going into Georgia tradition. It's so regional and so of those islands.
Up First from NPR
The Girls Who Were Sent Away
It was a form of resistance. You know, Dr. Buzzard, who was a really famous root doctor, he would, when someone's son got drafted, he would mix up a tea for them and have them drink it. And what people figured later is the tea had gunpowder in it that would give them some cardiac arrhythmia.
Up First from NPR
The Girls Who Were Sent Away
And so they'd go into their physicals and flunk their physicals and not be sent to usually Vietnam or Korea. So, you know, there was this really amazing other element to it where there was a really real world political edge to it.
Up First from NPR
The Girls Who Were Sent Away
Oh, I mean, I think that's something that haunts a lot of these women for the rest of their lives. You know, reading Ann Fessler's book, talking to a few people, you know, you're a kid. You can barely make decisions about what to wear. And suddenly you're being told you need to sign these papers and you have no choice. And these girls were not told their options.
Up First from NPR
The Girls Who Were Sent Away
They were not told, you know, their legal rights. And I think a lot of them, I mean, I know a lot of them are haunted by guilt for the rest of their lives. And I've seen people reunite with their kids after being sent to a maternity home. And it's incredible. It is really incredible. The healing that's there and how something feels completed is mind-blowing.
Up First from NPR
The Girls Who Were Sent Away
And I've seen, on the other hand, women who never saw their kids again. You know, it didn't necessarily ruin their lives, but it was always a shadow that hung over them for decades. And the fact that we did this on such a wholesale level as a society, and like you said, what made my jaw drop was how much we hated these girls.
Up First from NPR
The Girls Who Were Sent Away
I mean, newspaper editorials about how Alcatraz should be turned into a home for unwed mothers, newspaper columnists calling these girls sick and unnatural, and no consequences for the men. I read a lot of books of resources. I found one. Social Worker Manual, a handbook from 1974 that mentions unwed fathers in one sentence. And that's it.
Up First from NPR
The Girls Who Were Sent Away
You know, it's funny. I thought about this a lot, right? I write horror novels. I mean, I write entertainment. And in writing this, I was like, well, who are my bad guys? Who are my bad guys? Like, well, it can't be the witches. I mean, the witches are scary, but the witches are also offering knowledge and liberation. And then I thought, well, is it the people running the homes?
Up First from NPR
The Girls Who Were Sent Away
And I thought, no, you know, the people running the homes were really convinced they were doing what was best for these girls. Is it the girl who's got pregnant? No, of course it's not these girls who got pregnant. Some of them were date raped. Some of them were molested. Some of them just didn't even know what birth control was or have access to it.
Up First from NPR
The Girls Who Were Sent Away
It's one of those stories where there isn't a villain. There are just a lot of people who were really convinced that they were right. And That conviction did so much damage to so many millions of people.