Skylight Confessions-Alice Hoffman
Practical Magic Author Explores Tragedy, Fate, Marriage
When Arlyn's dad dies, the teen believes the man she is destined to be with will soon arrive. Skylight Confessions explores the relationship of two polar opposites.
Seventeen year old Arlyn Singer’s father’s funeral has just ended. She sits outside alone on the family’s front porch and waits. She thinks that the next man to walk down the street will be her true love. Soon John Moody, a Yale student, stops and asks for directions, and they start a sudden and passion filled relationship.
Polar Opposites
John Moody is a Yale senior; Arlyn has just finished high school. He is practical and deliberate. She is young and spontaneous. The two are the most unlikely of pairs, yet they soon marry and move into the Glass Slipper, a glass house John’s father designed and built, starting a life together that neither of them expected.
Relationships Begin and End
Arlyn and John soon find that they are both lonely in their troubled marriage. Soon after they marry Arlyn gives birth to his son, Sam, an action that makes the couple both realize how mismatched they are. Sam is a difficult and odd child, and John becomes distant to Arlyn. He instead reaches out to next door neighbor Cynthia for comfort and understanding. Arlyn, meanwhile, finds comfort in George, a man who makes weekly visits to the house to wash the windows. A few years later, Arlyn gives birth to a daughter, Blanca, but soon loses her fight with breast cancer and dies.
John first thinks he has found relief when Arlyn dies, but when her ghost returns to the house and haunts him, he realizes he loved her more than he ever let himself when she was alive.
Sam is hit especially hard by Arlyn’s death, and withdraws deeper into himself and away from his father. He turns to drugs and other illegal activities in the city, and sometimes leaves the house for days or weeks at a time, only to return more haggard and withdrawn than before. His sister Blanca tries to help him, but he is alternately kind and hurtful to her, and eventually the two drift apart.
Alice Hoffman’s nineteenth novel is a dark story of modern magic that’s illuminated by Hoffman’s lyrical prose. The themes are dark and events tragic, but the complicated and sometimes supernatural events make the story compelling and worth reading. At 272 pages, the story seems short; Hoffman could have delved deeper into the characters and their personalities, taking a longer look at the characters’ troubled relationships with each other and themselves.
About the Author
Alice Hoffman was born in New York City on March 16, 1952, and grew up on Long Island. She received a bachelor’s degree from Adelphi University, and then was a Mirrellees Fellowship at Stanford University’s Creative Writing Center, which she attended in 1973-1974, receiving an MA in creative writing.
She is the author of 15 novels, two books of short fiction, and six books for children. Hoffman's work has been published in more than 20 translations and in excess of 100 foreign editions. Her novel Here on Earth, an Oprah Book Club pick, is a modern reworking of some of the themes of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. Practical Magic was a Warner film starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman.
Hoffman, Alice
Skylight Confessions
Little, Brown and Company, January 11, 2007
