Few are more surprised by the staying power of Practical Magic than its author, Alice Hoffman. Even after her 1995 novel was turned into a major motion picture starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman , Hoffman wasn’t convinced that Practical Magic 2 would ever be possible.

“I didn’t think of it as a series until my readers started to write to me,” she tells Vanity Fair, “and say they really wanted to know what had happened to the aunts and what their life had been like before Sally and Gillian came into their lives.”

In 2017, Hoffman reentered her witchy world with The Rules of Magic —a prequel about Sally (Bullock) and Gillian’s (Kidman) eccentric aunts, Frances (played by Stockard Channing) and Jet (Dianne Wiest). With Magic Lessons, released in 2020, Hoffman told the tale of Maria Owens, who began the ancestral line of family witches after surviving persecution at the Salem witch trials.

By 2021, Hoffman opted to write The Book of Magic , a sequel to her original story, centered on Sally’s grown-up daughters, Kylie and Antonia; it now serves as the basis for Practical Magic 2, coming to theaters on September 10, nearly 30 years after the first movie’s 1998 debut.

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Hoffman revisits themes of witchcraft, sisterhood, and love complicated by magic spells in her new novel, The Witches of Cambridge , out September 8; it focuses on two female friends who discover a secret society while attending college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, during the height of Red Scare–era McCarthyism. At age 74, the New York Times best-selling author is hitting a stride of which most writers dream.

When she speaks with VF, Hoffman is fresh off the set of the Disney+ TV adaptation of her first YA novel, Aquamarine . The Witches of Cambridge is also being adapted into a Hulu series with producer Noah Hawley, and Hoffman’s at work on a Broadway musical adaptation of Practical Magic alongside Norah Jones .

The secret to Hoffman’s page-to-stage success? “I don’t have the feeling of, I want to control it and I want to keep it in the palm of my hand,” she explains of the various adaptations. “It may not be the exact words you wrote or the exact scene you wrote, but I have felt so far that the heart of the matter is still there, and that’s what I’m more interested in.”

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

‘The Witches of Cambridge’ by Alice Hoffman