All things, good or bad, must come to an end. So ends this series today. It’s time to say thank you to all of you who were with me these seven months, encouraging me with your phone calls, emails and chat messages. You are now family.
Let me conclude the conversation we began seven months ago discussing Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro with the wealthiest novelist in history, J.K Rowling. Its safe to say I know a lot about J.K Rowling. Don’t we all? We know she wrote the first of her amazing books in cafes while being a single, jobless mother living on charity. Yet, sadly, I confess I know little about her books. I tried ever so hard to complete the first Harry Potter book, but could not go beyond the first few pages (I gave up reading when Harry jumped on a broomstick and began to fly). It is amply clear, and regretfully too, that I belong to the rare species who failed to be lured by Harry-Potter-magic when the rest of the world swooned at the mere mention of his name.
Thankfully so. Because Harry Potter brought fame and much needed wealth to J.K Rowling. According to the London Sunday Times, by 2012, Rowling was worth nine hundred million dollars. Before that, in 2004, Forbes reported that Rowling was the first person to become a billionaire by writing books. (Later, she dropped off the list because she gave so much money to charity).
Today she lives in a seventeenth-century house in Edinburgh, with conifer hedges said to be about twenty feet tall, they reach higher than the street lamps in front of them. According to Ian Parker who interviewed her for the New Yorker, the entrance to her house evokes the spiteful maze in the film adaptation of “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.” The huge living-wall and the old fashioned house in which she lives with her second husband, Neil Murray, a doctor, and their children might symbolize Rowling’s reputation for reserve: “for being likable but shy and thin-skinned, and not at all comfortable with the personal impact of having created a modern myth, sold four hundred and fifty million books, and inspired more than six hundred thousand pieces of Harry Potter fan fiction, a total that increases by at least a thousand stories a week.”
Growing up, Rowling was constantly writing and telling stories to her younger sister, Dianne. “Certainly the first story I ever wrote down (when I was five or six) was about a rabbit called Rabbit,” she said in a 1998 interview. “He got the measles and was visited by his friends, including a giant bee called Miss Bee. And ever since Rabbit and Miss Bee, I have wanted to be a writer, though I rarely told anyone so.”
Her parents, Peter James Rowling and Anne Volant married when they were 20, and neither attended college: Her father, an aircraft engineer at Rolls Royce and her mother, a high school science technician failed to see writing as a promising career for their eldest daughter. In her 2008 Harvard University commencement speech, Rowling recalled, “I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that would never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension. “
And so in 1982, she took the entrance exams for Oxford but was not accepted, and instead studied French at Exeter, a university with a reputation for being “frantically posh,” as Rowling put it. She was suddenly among privately educated girls, in pearls and turned-up shirt collars. Paraphrasing Fitzgerald, she said that she reacted to Exeter “not with the rage of the revolutionary but the smoldering hatred of the peasant.”
After graduating, in 1986, she worked for a while at Amnesty International, in London, on the research desk for Francophone Africa. In 1990, she had her Harry Potter inspiration, on a delayed train from Manchester to London’s King’s Cross station. Over the next five years, she outlined the plots for seven books in the series, writing in longhand and amassing scraps of notes written on different papers.
To quote Parker, that year, her mother died and in 1991, she took a job as an English teacher in Portugal. “It was total fight or flight,” she says. “I’d had a terrible time. Several things happened at once. My mother died, which was obviously the huge one. A long relationship I’d been in ended—and a couple of other things,” including being made redundant from an office job in Manchester. In Porto, she met and married Jorge Arantes, a journalist. She taught at night, and during the day she wrote and listened to Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto. Jessica was born in the summer of 1993, and the relationship with Arantes ended soon afterward.
At the end of 1993, she returned to Britain with Jessica, and spent Christmas in Edinburgh with her sister, who was working there as a nurse. She had three chapters of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” in her suitcase.
Rowling has sad memories of her arrival in Edinburgh. “I was very depressed,” she says. “I felt life was a train wreck. I’d carried this baby out of it, and I was in this place that was very alien and cold, and quite grim.” She decided to stay, with the intention of becoming a schoolteacher; she would need to complete a one-year training course but chose to delay enrollment until she’d finished her book.
She signed up for welfare benefits, and found an unappealing apartment, where she lived for a few months. She was so depressed that she sought therapy and “pressed on with the book, until things came together. In my head, at least,” says Rowling. She finished “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” in 1995, shortly before starting her teacher-training course.
Twelve publishers rejected the first Harry Potter manuscript. Finally, the book was accepted by Christopher Little, an “obscure London literary agent.” Little made a deal to print 500 copies with Bloomsbury, a relatively young publishing company, and secured her a £2,500 advance.
The publishers anticipated that boys may not want to read books written by a woman, so they suggested she pick a pen name with two initials. The “J” stands for Joanne, her real name. She has no middle name, so she picked “K” for “Kathleen,” which was the name of her paternal grandmother.
“Philosopher’s Stone” won the Children’s Book of the Year at the British Book Awards, and a gold award in the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize, which is voted for by children. The book also sold to Scholastic, in New York, for more than a hundred thousand dollars. With the money, Rowling bought a new apartment and continued to write. She published the second novel, “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,” in 1998.
Since then, the seven books in the series changed the lives of those who read them showing that each book possessed a magic of their own. As Rowling said in conversation with Parker, “Very recently, I met a girl in a shop. She was in her early twenties, and she came up to me and said, ‘May I hug you?’ And I said yes, and we hugged. And she said, ‘You were my childhood.’ That’s an amazing thing to hear.”
It’s amazing to hear what Rowling said at her Harvard commencement speech too. “It is fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale,” she said addressing the young graduates in the audience. “An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.
“That period of my life was a dark one, I had no idea then how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality...Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea...You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.”
Her last words to the Harvard graduates quoting Seneca are a fitting end to my column, too.
“As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.”
So, until our paths cross again, friends, fellow writers and country men, here’s wishing you cloudless blue skies, now and forever. Adieu.
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