Hilarie Burton Morgan on Building a Better Life Through ‘Magic and Mischief’

The actress, producer and author’s second book, ‘Grimoire Girl,’ blends memoir and advice for anyone who wants to create a more meaningful existence

If Hilarie Burton Morgan’s first book, The Rural Diaries, hoped to inspire readers with her tale of moving back to the country and taking on a life filled with babies, animals and adventure, her second volume aims even deeper.

“My first book was certainly about community, looking outward, and how to build that community so that you feel safe and fulfilled where you are,” Burton Morgan says. “This book is a look inward. This is, ‘How do I create myself? How do I acknowledge what's hard? How do I sift through grief or insecurity or indecision in a way that is healthy?’”

In Grimoire Girl: Creating an Inheritance of Magic and Mischief, slated to be published on October 3, Burton Morgan taps into her lifelong fascination with all things magical and enchanted, and the urge to gather together and share them with readers.

“A grimoire has stereotypically been a book that is kept by a witch, or a book that was found in someone's possession and led to their persecution hundreds of years ago,” she says. “It is a book of knowledge that you keep throughout your life, that you continue to add to as you get older. And you can either pass it down, or it can be destroyed when you die. But it is your book of life-saving knowledge.”

Life-saving knowledge, it turns out, can encompass a wide swath of subjects, from how to honor your personal history and memories to advice on using candles and color to craft a home that feels uniquely yours.

“It became a personal archeology project,” says Burton Morgan. “How do I dig up what is important and preserve it so that it can be passed on to my kids? And then how do I flesh it out and make it make sense?”

For Burton Morgan, whose television career began soon after she graduated from high school in Virginia, the idea of home exerts a powerful pull — from remembering her childhood room to creating the Hudson Valley place she and her husband, actor Jeffrey Dean Morgan, named Mischief Farm. Los Angeles, which she lived in only briefly, never felt like home.

“And everything about it felt off for me. There are great parts of L.A.; I think it is a really fun city to visit. But I needed to be someplace where every time I go into a restaurant, I see my buddies. And everybody knows each other's names, and we're all doing PTA together. I wanted to cultivate that kind of community that I had grown up with for our kids.”

Another of the book’s most powerful themes is spirituality, whether that’s found in the Christian saints, Greek and Roman gods and goddesses or the powerful pull of nature-based religions such as Wicca.

“Well, I think spirituality is certainly the balm that can help us deal with a lot of the hard stuff,” says Burton Morgan. “For me, growing up in the satanic panic era of the 1980s, I'd been fed a lot of wrong information. So as I got older and started looking into things for myself, I realized how similar all of these different avenues of faith are, and how they all carry that same message of, ‘just be good to each other; be good to the earth.’”

After all, she adds, “A lot of the stories of the saints are very, very similar to the stories of gods and goddesses. And when you see that kind of crossover, hopefully it is a narrative that can help people come to terms with all of our similarities, as opposed to all of our differences.”

Following her years at MTV, Hilarie Burton Morgan appeared on the teen drama One Tree Hill from 2003 to 2009, an experience that led to her current podcast, Drama Queens, which she co-hosts along with former castmates Sophia Bush and Bethany Joy Lenz. A slew of other television and movie appearances followed One Tree Hill.

These days, she says, her focus is more on writing. But, she adds, “I love the television show that I work on, ‘It Couldn't Happen Here,’ for Sundance. It's true crime programming, and it's advocacy. And using my platform for something other than selling music videos or teen dramas or network television shows. It feels really good to focus on people who need help.”

In a world in which aging is sometimes difficult for women, Burton Morgan, 40, has recently attracted attention for letting her hair go naturally gray. Her hair color is one of the first things that pops up in an internet search of the actress.

“Isn't that weird?” she asks. “I mean, look, I started doing TV literally the second I graduated high school. I have given the entirety of my youth to other people. And there's something really rewarding for me to just say, ‘f—- it,’ and let my hair grow gray. 'Cause I wasn't necessarily respected as a kid, so why would I want to hang on to that?

“I think people put so much emphasis on staying young forever. But I have found so much more fulfillment and respect and success and happiness the second I was like, ‘I'm not going to play by those rules anymore.’ It feels good to kind of scoff in the face of that. And my husband's a silver fox. No one ever questioned him going gray. So I do laugh at it anytime I see someone making a big deal out of it.”

Asked whether she considers herself a witch, Burton Morgan laughs again. “Oh, of course. I'm the scariest lady in town! Ask any of my son's friends.”

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