© The Harry Potter Galleries, MARCH 24, 2001

J.K. Rowling - The First Years with Harry

We've gone through the archives and compiled some interesting statements of Harry Potter author Joanne Rowling, that give some insight of how Harry came to life. All excerpts had been originally printed in British newspapers, back in 1997 and 1998.

J.K. Rowling on...

Reading in her Childhood
As a child herself, growing up in Chepstow, Joanne and her younger sister, Di, read avidly. "My most vivid memory of childhood is my father sitting and reading Wind in the Willows to me. I had measles at the time, very badly, but I don't remember that; I just remember the book." She loved C. S. Lewis and E. Nesbit, but was not such a fan of Roald Dahl. As for the Enid Blyton books, Rowling says she read them all, but was never tempted to go back to them, whereas she would read and re-read Lewis. "Even now, if I was in a room with one of the Narnia books I would pick it up like a shot and re-read it." (2)

Getting older
J.K. Rowling: "Hermione is a caricature of me: I was neither as bright nor as annoying as Hermione. At least, I hope I wasn't, because I would have deserved drowning at birth. But she, like me, lightens up. As I went through my teens, things actually got better. I began to realise that there was more to me than just someone who got everything right."

"I'm someone who's definitely got happier as they've got older. I feel more and more comfortable with myself and I've always had this feeling that in my forties, I will finally hit serenity. I really hope it's true because I could do with a bit of serenity. I definitely wouldn't go back and do childhood again. I don't look back on it as a phase of blissful happiness at all." (2)

Writing the first Book
After leaving Exeter University, where J.K. Rowling read French and Classics, she started work as a teacher but daydreamed about becoming a writer. One day, stuck on a delayed train for four hours between Manchester and London, she dreamt up a boy called Harry Potter. That was in 1990. It took her six years to write the book. In the meantime she went to teach in Portugal, married a Portuguese TV journalist, had her daughter, Jessica, divorced her husband and returned to Britain when Jessica was just three months old.

She went to live in Edinburgh to be near her sister, Di. "I was at rock bottom. I arrived back in Britain about a month before John Major made his infamous 'single parents are the root of society's ills' speech. I was fighting very hard to keep my head above the water and I thought it was a despicable thing to say, victimising people who are already incredibly vulnerable. Most of them have no escape route. I was very lucky, I was a graduate and I had some very sellable skills so it didn't last for long." Rowling's sudden penury made her realise that it was "back-against-the-wall time" and she decided to finish her Harry Potter book.

"I was very depressed and having a newborn child made it doubly difficult. The little money I had went on baby gear and all I could afford on housing benefit was a freezing, terribly grotty little flat. I simply felt like a non-person, I was very low, and I had to achieve something. Without the challenge I would have gone stark raving mad." (1)

She meant to leave Edinburgh after Christmas, but somehow never did. One rainy afternoon she told her sister, Di, the story of Harry and gave her those first chapters to read. "It's possible that if she hadn't laughed, I would have set the whole thing on one side," Rowling says today. But Di did laugh - and there followed six months of writing in conditions of poverty.

"I had no intention, no desire, to remain on benefits. It's the most soul-destroying thing. I don't want to dramatise, but there were nights when, though Jessica ate, I didn't. The suggestion that you would deliberately make yourself entitled . . . you'd have to be a complete idiot."

"I was a graduate, I had skills, I knew that my prospects long-term were good. It must be different for women who don't have that belief and end up in that poverty trap - it's the hopelessness of it, the loss of self-esteem. For me, at least, it was only six months. I was writing all the time, which really saved my sanity. As soon as Jessie was asleep, I'd reach for pen and paper." (3)

She could not face her cold and miserable flat, so she would walk the streets of Edinburgh, pushing Jessica in a buggy until she fell asleep, and would then rush into a café and write for two hours, the baby sleeping next to her. "I reached a point where diffidence was a luxury I couldn't afford any more. I thought, 'What is the worst that could happen?' Every publishing company in Britain could turn me down: big deal." She typed out two manuscripts - she could not afford to photocopy it - and sent them to two agents in London whom she had picked out of a yearbook in the local library. (2)

Missing her Mother
The books are marked by an inventive wit and vivid characterisation. And there are undercurrents to the adventures, a sense of morality that is subtle and emotions that run deep. After reading the first in the series, it is no surprise to hear Rowling say that when her mother died, aged 45, of multiple sclerosis, she changed the book to reflect her own grief. In one chapter Harry looks into a magic mirror which allows the viewer to see what their heart most desires, and finds his dead parents waving at him. "He had a powerful kind of ache inside him, half joy, half terrible sadness," writes Rowling.

"I was conscious that when I looked in the mirror, I would see exactly what Harry saw. But it was only when I'd written it that I fully realised where it had all come from. It is an enormous regret to me that my mother never knew about any of this, second only to the fact that she never met my daughter." (2)

""She was a compulsive, continual reader and that rubbed off on me. I had no idea that MS would hit her so quickly. And I wasn't there. That stirs up such guilt. She knew I wrote, but she never read any of it. Can you imagine how much I regret that? There's a chapter in the book where Harry sees his dead parents in a magic mirror, and I know that if my mother hadn't died I would have treated that a lot less seriously." (3)

Friends
She has a few close friends, who stuck by her during the hard times. "I really know who my friends are because there was a period when there was absolutely no kudos in being my friend. People really helped me - I'm not talking about money, I'm talking about just being there when I was miserable." Since her success, a couple of fairweather friends have crawled back out of the woodwork. "I didn't pick up the phone. I just thought, 'Don't now decide that I was a fantastically interesting person all along, when for a year I wasn't interesting at all.'" (2)

The Café
For three and a half years, J.K. Rowling has been a regular at Nicolson's, off Princes Street in Edinburgh, ordering up espresso and a glass of water and writing a novel in laborious longhand, her baby daughter sleeping alongside. There were days, Rowling recalls, when she would manoeuvre the buggy down Nicolson's staircase, her legs shaking from the caffeine overdose. Today, thanks to the blinding, disorienting financial success of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Rowling likes to give her interviews here in the café, the size of a dance hall. Its staff are on hand and are as close as family and discreetly proud of their prodigy. (3)

Her Daughter Jessica
In Portugal, J.K. Rowling taught English, wrote three chapters of Harry Potter, met and married a Portuguese journalist and gave birth to her daughter, Jessica. The child is named after Rowling's heroine, both in life and literature, Jessica Mitford. The reasons? "That she remained so different from the background that she came from, that her first husband died so young, that she lost two of her four kids in tragic circumstances - and yet she had no self-pity and a fabulous sense of humour right to the bitter end. I gave my daughter a copy of Mitford's Hons and Rebels for her christening." (3)

Getting an Agent
J.K. Rowling: "I didn't know anything about agents but I went to the library and looked up some addresses in the Artists' and Writers' Yearbook. Christopher Little was only the second agent I wrote to. I remember getting a letter back. I assumed it was a rejection note, but inside the envelope there was a letter saying, 'Thank you. We would be pleased to receive the balance of your manuscript on an exclusive basis.' It was the best letter of my life, I read it eight times. Later on Christopher rang and said there was an auction going on in America. He said I should get ready because a Mr Arthur Levine of the Scholastic Press would pay a six-figure sum and would be ringing me in 10 minutes. I nearly died." (1)

Selling the American book rights
J.K. Rowling has sold her first book to an American publisher for more than £100,000. What makes the deal remarkable is that Joanne Rowling's tome is not a novel or a heavyweight biography, but a children's story. Two Hollywood studios and an independent American producer are also competing to buy the film rights for her 80,000-word yarn, Harry Potter and the Philospher's Stone. "I think it is probably fair to say that most children's authors struggle along earning about £2,000 a year," said Christopher Little, Miss Rowling's literary agent. "As far as I know, the size of this deal is unprecedented." (1)

"It's funny when something like that happens to you and it is so unexpected and beyond your wildest dreams, your immediate reaction isn't happiness, it's shock," J.K. Rowling says. "I was paralysed with shock. And I also felt pressured since I was just about to finish the second book when I received all the publicity. I thought that all these people would think it was just hype if the second book was rubbish." (4)

Being no Prima Donna
We have agreed to meet at ten at her publishers, Bloomsbury, in Soho Square. At eleven, a thin young woman with long flame-red hair bursts through the door, distraught and dishevelled. "I'm so sorry. I'm just really really sorry," she keeps saying, shaking like a leaf and looking as though she might cry. With a strong coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other, she slowly calms down but cannot stop apologising.

"It did cross my mind in the taxi that some Floo powder would have been hugely handy," she says, half-laughing through her agitation. A long and complicated explanation tumbles out: the hotel refused to let her check out, having lost her name in the computer, and then, having found her name, insisted that her prepaid bill had not been settled. "I was halfway here in the taxi and I was so upset by being so late for you, and then I realised I didn't have my purse. So I just burst into tears." (2)

References:
(1) The Daily Telegraph, "£100,000 success story for penniless mother" by Nigel Reynolds. July 7, 1997.
(2) The Daily Telegraph, "Harry Potter charms a nation" by Helena de Bertodano. July 25, 1998.
(3) The Daily Telegraph, "From the dole to Hollywood" by Elisabeth Dunn. August 2, 1997.
(4) Western Daily Press, "Writer Joanne hits the magic jackpot" by Sarah Harris. November 3, 1998.
 

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