Response to an excerpt from Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman in which Kylie lets her aunt cut and dye her hair, even though she knows her mother will be horrified.

Practical Magic is a story about sisters, mothers, and daughters. Gillian is the sister who never really grew up; when she went to high school all the boys started going crazy about her and she went through them faster than you can say knife. Sally is the one who did the laundry and read The Joy of Cooking instead of dating. Twenty years later, when Sally has two daughters of her own, Gillian enters their calm lives and proceeds to make chaos. Kylie has just turned thirteen and is trapped somewhere between the two: her mother is her mother, but Gillian is so cool.

I think a lot of teenagers feel like Kylie. We’ve been doing what’s expected of us for most of our lives, but now it’s almost expected of us that we won’t. The question is not only how to rebel, but how much to rebel. If we go all out we’ll make our parents hate us, but if we don’t do anything our friends will scorn us. It’s like in cartoons when people have an angel and a demon whispering in their ears: here’s Sally on the right shoulder and Gillian on the left shoulder, both shouting conflicting advice. Kylie knows she wants to do something to change her life, but she also wants to keep her mother happy. Where’s her compromise? She ends up going with Gillian and dying her hair, which causes her mother to blow a gasket.

Eventually the two pairs of sisters are brought together when they all have to deal with the ghost of Gillian’s boyfriend, who’s been hanging around the house and causing a lot of trouble. With the aid of still another pair of sisters, Sally and Gillian’s aunts, they banish the ghost, and every one of them gets a man. It’s a silly ending, but that’s all right. And even though every one of the four is very different from the others, sometimes violently so, they get along all right in the end. Sally, who never rebelled, rebels a little by falling in love with an FBI agent. Gillian, who never stopped rebelling, settles down a little and gets married. So even when we choose one extreme over another, it often works out okay. It’s odd how things settle down after the main turmoil is over: even if someone’s hair is still another color or they’re still pregnant or gay or living in New York, things seem a little less extreme after a while. The changes you thought were going to change your life forever somehow seem less important than they did when you made them.

So maybe the lesson to be learned here is that it doesn’t matter too much which way you go when you rebel. You’re going to offend people no matter what you do, so you may as well go with what you feel like. Maybe the real coming of age is when you realize that you weren’t doing anything so important, after all.