Maguire's aunt became attached to him and wanted to adopt him. But Maguire's father, John, refused and put him in an orphanage, expecting someday to reunite the family. After his father remarried, Maguire returned home. However, during his stay at the orphanage the nuns had dubbed him "Gregory the Executive" because he never smiled.
After Maguire rejoined his three siblings, the family grew as his father and his new wife, Marie, had three more children. Maguire remembered his childhood as being a happy one, with a few exceptions. His parents, who had grown up during the Depression, scrimped by dressing the children in hand-me-downs and giving them home haircuts. Yet his parents were generous when it came to encouraging reading. "What we lacked in material luxury--bicycles, horseback-riding lessons, our own individual televisions or stereos, or even new clothes to show off--we made up in our reading lives. Our parents shared a love of reading and the written and spoken word, and the ceremony of a young Maguire getting his or her first library card was treated with as much solemn joy as a First Communion or a birthday," Maguire wrote in Something about the Author Autobiography Series (SAAS).
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