Ingeniously, Quinn has outfitted the book with a literary device guaranteed to discourage bad reviews. Her fellow scribblers can only kick themselves for not thinking of it first. Quinn begins with a loving portrait of her childhood in Georgia, where the family servants schooled her in voodoo. Her mother was already initiated. When the local vet misdiagnosed the family dachshund, Quinn tells us, Mom lost her temper and cried, “I hope you drop dead!”
“And,” she writes laconically, “he did.”
In the next chapter we learn that 10-year-old Sally came under the care of a doctor who upset her mother. Mom fed him the same line she gave the vet, and “he died shortly thereafter.”
Well, life goes on—not for the vet and the doctor, of course, but for Sally. She grew up and moved to Washington and dated a yummy reporter. Once he flirted with another woman. “I won’t say exactly what I did—even now it would be bad luck for me,” she writes. “I worked on the hex for several days.” The woman killed herself. In his reading chair, the reviewer stirs uneasily.
Next we read about Clay Felker, the editor of New York magazine, who commissioned a scurrilous profile of Quinn. She put a hex on him. Suddenly the magazine was sold and Felker was fired and publicly humiliated. “Clay never recovered professionally,” she tells us. “Worse, he got cancer, which ultimately led to his death.”
Here the reviewer pauses to reflect. That’s four hexes and four corpses, two undertaken by Sally when she got extremely upset. And bad reviews can be extremely upsetting to an author. By the time the reviewer reads about the fortune teller—she foretold an unhappy future for Quinn’s son and, after Sally worked her mojo, died of a cerebral hemorrhage—why, the glowing review practically writes itself.
Sally Quinn has been writing books and articles for more than 40 years, yet her prose retains a childlike, disarming artlessness that makes Finding Magic and its serial revelations all the more arresting. She buys a house, she switches jobs, she kills someone with a hex…the tone never changes. “During my college years I had occasional psychic moments,” is how she begins one chapter, as if daring you to stop reading. Another chapter begins: “I love the Tarot.” She talks to ghosts. On her first visit to the Middle East, she faces her own personal Arab–Israeli conflict: She is torn, she tells us, between sleeping with the Israeli defense minister and “the Palestinian leader, an incredible hunk wearing traditional robes.” (She decides to stay faithful to her beau back home.) She reads minds and thinks you can, too: “It is just a matter of time before we don’t have to speak to one another anymore.” She has sex frequently and ardently. It’s all here.