While pursuing my MFA at Butler University, I had the privilege of meeting Charlie Jane Anders, whose work crossed journalism, fantasy, and science fiction. I remember talking to her at a Visiting Writers event, where she asked me what my MFA thesis was going to be, and when I told her the plot in detail, she smiled and said that it sounded like a book she would read. But what cements her in my memory is what happened the next day, when I attended a larger speaking engagement of hers, and I brought a copy of one of her books to sign. She remembered me, and signed my book with a note of encouragement about finishing my idea, mentioning specific details from my summary. Needless to say, Charlie Jane Anders is a pretty cool person and writer.
The book she signed for me was her award-winning All the Birds in the Sky, which I can’t quite recall entirely since it’s been almost a decade since I read it. But when I saw that her latest book, Lessons in Magic and Disaster, was about a young witch teaching her mother magic and reckoning with an upcoming PhD dissertation, I was hooked.
Jamie may look like a regular struggling English PhD student wrangling with her upcoming dissertation and listless students, but she is also secretly a practicing witch. Since she was thirteen years old, she has taught herself magic in secret. But she decides to teach her grieving mother Serena these secrets in order to help her move through the grief of losing both her wife Mae and her law career. Serena takes to magic very quickly, but her spells have far-reaching consequences, and Jamie will have to work quickly if she’s going to set everything right again before things fall apart for her like they did for Serena…
What elevates Lessons in Magic and Disaster above the typical witch narrative for me is the addition of Serena’s story. While Jamie teaches Serena magic and tries to write her dissertation, we jump back to how Serena met her wife Mae and how the two grew together as a couple, from Jamie’s birth to Serena’s blossoming law career, and finally what happened to turn Serena into a lonely recluse. It was not an easy beginning, with Mae and Serena fighting fat-shaming and homophobia in their work, and figuring out how to raise a child together, hoping that she’ll be strong enough for it.
Heartbreakingly, the book even tackles how queer and trans people have a much harder time accessing genuine and quality healthcare. Without going into spoilers, let’s just say that if some healthcare providers were less judgemental and dismissive of this community, someone in this book would have made it to the end.
In this story, magic is not about saying a cute little rhyme over a lit candle, as much as it is about making an honest wish and sending it to the universe. Jamie is always looking for liminal spaces where something was started but not finished, which are the most powerful spots for magic, oftentimes out in the woods. There, she will use items that represent her desire, gather up all her energy, and send that wish out. At first, Jamie believes that magic is a delicate science, where you cannot think too hard about the working and your wish must be as specific as possible. But it becomes especially delicate when, at some point, a spell actually causes someone to disappear. At that point, magic is no longer just a spiritual practice: it is an honest-to-goodness force that can cause real harm if not used carefully.
Once again, witchcraft proves a great lens to talk about societal anxieties, which is, in this case, injustices faced by the queer community. Jamie does not use witchcraft to exact vengeance, although as a trans person with bullies, she would have every reason to; in fact, the idea of casting curses seems unheard of among other witches she meets. But Serena poses the idea of casting a curse on a far right-wing internet personality who had something to do with her law career implosion, and Jamie urges her to be careful about the consequences of baneful magic.
The question of whether a hateful person ought to be punished, in this case with a curse, raises a very important point, not just for queer people but for all people. Although it is important to stand against those who disregard your humanity, it is just as important to point your energy toward living your best life and building up your community. But the temptation of punishing homophobes, transphobes, and so on, is still a valid conundrum to contend with, and the book doesn’t necessarily talk down to those who wish for vengeance on people like that.
In the midst of all this, Jamie tries to pull together all her thoughts on 18th century queer literature for her thesis, going off on lengthy tangents about writers, themes, and theories. In particular, she’s writing about a book written by a woman who was queer and also, in theory, a witch, and Jamie obsesses over how all these parts fit together. It was kind of hard to get into at first, because I was enjoying Jamie and Serena’s stories so much. But as the pieces fit better together, you start to appreciate just how much Jamie knows this period in literature, as well as how the studied literature matches the present-day story. It’s very charming when characters have a niche obsession and people around them both enjoy and dislike her “teacher voice”, and Jamie is one such charming character.
That said, I feel like Jamie might connect best with readers who are familiar with or enjoy English literature scholarship. Her constant speculation about her thesis research could put off folks who just don’t care about that stuff, because once she starts, she really gets going. I liked it, though, because it brought me back to writing my own English thesis, for better or worse.
Jamie’s intense curiosity helps make her interesting though, because, in a story like this, no one has it completely together. Everyone is just trying to figure their shit out in a world that does not thoroughly accommodate being queer, and it’s, in a way, very relatable and easy to read. Although the characters are messy, there is still a lot of curiosity and optimism, and it doesn’t fetishize the characters’ trauma.
Lessons in Magic and Disaster tackles some heavy topics, and yet, the overall tone is still light and whimsical. Sad things happen, but you never feel bogged down in the growing heaviness. It might be because Jamie’s scholarly inquisitiveness is exuberant and always leading her down interesting roads, and because magic is a metaphor for reclamation and agency. If Charlie Jane Anders’ other works include meditations on heavy topics that are somehow elevated by whimsy and optimism, she’ll be a very comforting writer to return to.
The Library Key 