Wild About Harry

PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION FOR TIME BY JACQUES BARBEY

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This speech is one of the darkest and most unsettling in the Potter books to date. It creates a vivid physical embodiment of a painful mental state, which Muggles call depression, and it demonstrates Rowling's considerable emotional range. She can be both genuinely scary and consistently funny, adept at both broad slapstick and allusive puns and wordplay. She appeals to the peanut gallery with such items as Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans, a wizard candy that means what it says on its package; it offers every flavor, ranging from chocolate and peppermint to liver and tripe and earwax. But Rowling also names the Hogwarts caretaker Argus Filch, evidently hoping that a few adult readers will remember that Argus, in Greek mythology, was a watchman with eyes all over his body. And even if no one else picks up the reference, it's the sort of touch that can prompt an author's inward smile.

It was such fun to write," rowling says of the first Harry Potter book. "They still are incredibly fun to write." She lives comfortably but not lavishly in Edinburgh with her daughter Jessie, 6, fending off as many outside demands on her time as she can in order to keep writing. She was completely unprepared for, and doesn't much like, all the press attention that has been mounting since she became a best-selling first novelist. During some early interviews, she mentioned that her beginning work on the Harry Potter books corresponded briefly with a bad patch in her personal life. She was newly divorced, temporarily out of work, on the dole and living in an unheated Edinburgh flat. To keep them both warm, she would wheel her young daughter into a cafe and sometimes jot down Harry Potter ideas on napkins.

Rowling grew annoyed when newspapers played up this anecdote as a dominant chapter in her life. "It was a great story," she concedes. "I would have liked to read it about someone else." But the tale came to define her, the product of a middle-class family and a university education, as a welfare mom who hit the jackpot. Worse, some papers began using her success as an implied criticism of poor, single women who lacked the gumption to write themselves off the dole. "That's absolute rubbish," Rowling says. "This is not vanity or arrogance, but if you look at the facts, very, very few people manage to write anything that might be a best seller. Therefore, I'm lucky by anyone's standards, let alone single mothers' standards."

Rowling says the urge to be a writer came to her early during what she describes as a "dreamy" internal childhood. She began writing stories when she was six. She also read widely, whipping through Ian Fleming at age nine. Sometime later she discovered Jane Austen, whom Rowling calls "my favorite author ever." She was writing a novel for adults when, during a 1990 train ride, "Harry Potter strolled into my head fully formed." For the next five years Rowling worked on Book One and plotted out the whole series, which will consist of seven novels, one for each year Harry spends at Hogwarts. "Those five years really went into creating a whole world. I know far more than the reader will ever need to know about ridiculous details."

Rowling insists that she never consciously set out to write for children, but that working on Harry Potter taught her how easily she could tap into her childhood memories. "I really can, with no difficulty at all, think myself back to 11 years old [Harry's age when the series opens]. You're very powerless, and kids have this whole underworld that to adults is always going to be impenetrable." That's a good description of the social setup she portrays at Hogwarts, where the students have stretches of time with little or no adult supervision. Rowling believes young people enjoy reading about peers who have a real control over their destiny. "Harry has to make his choices. He has limited access to really caring adults."

Since her characters grow a year older in each book, Rowling says that certain unavoidable changes are in store for them and the readers. A hint of what's ahead appears in The Prisoner of Azkaban, when Harry notices Cho Chang, the only girl on the Ravenclaw Quidditch team. "She was shorter than Harry by about a head, and Harry couldn't help noticing, nervous as he was, that she was extremely pretty. She smiled at Harry as the teams faced each other behind their captains, and he felt a slight lurch in the region of his stomach that he didn't think had anything to do with nerves."