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J.K. Rowling and the Extraordinary Life (Part 1 of 2)
by Claire E. White
When one reads about Joanne Kathleen Rowling in the mainstream
press, one generally is bombarded by a barrage of numbers: the millions of
books she's sold, the hundreds of millions of dollars she's made,
the millions of fans who love her work. But is it really appropriate to
value a writer by the amount of money she makes? To an artist the notion is
repugnant. Yet in our materialistic world it is a convenient measure
of something that most authors do value: the popularity of their work.
For each dollar spent on Harry Potter books is an indication of the
millions of children and adults who enjoy spending time at Hogwarts
when they could be surfing the Internet, watching TV or playing outside.
And the numbers that one is faced with are truly astounding.
J.K. Rowling has been
ranked as #40 on Forbes' list of the 100 most powerful women in the world.
She is the first author in history to be worth $1 billion, and is only one
of five women who are self-made billionaires. She has accomplished the nearly unthinkable
for a modern writer: she
has achieved overwhelming
critical and financial success in her own lifetime.
Forbes classifies her as a "media dynamo," which from all accounts is
somewhat amazing to the modest British girl whose greatest dream was
to see one of her books for sale
in a bookshop and -- if fortune smiled upon her -- to have a positive
book review in a national newspaper. Forbes says:
"Her Harry Potter books have sold a stunning 270 million copies in 62
languages worldwide. Her sixth installment of the Harry Potter blockbuster
series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, sold a breathtaking 6.9
million copies in its first 24 hours of release and is the largest-ever
product debut on Amazon.com. Generating more than $100 million in revenue,
her new book's debut is not only the richest opening in publishing
history but also gave heart palpitations to the makers of the movie
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which debuted the same weekend as
the new book. This seven-year phenomenon is not letting up anytime soon,
though Rowling has said the seventh installment will be her last. Harry
Potter movies, with their antic capers of magic and wizardry at the
Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, have grossed an impressive
$2.5 billion to date, including DVDs." 1
She has also collected the unwanted trappings of celebrity: reporters
used to pound on her front door while she was making dinner
(until she moved into a more security-conscious home), rumors about her
life appear regularly in the newspapers and on the Internet (which she
gleefully and regularly rebuts personally on her
website),
and she is recognized on the street by fans. She has also earned what is
undoubtedly the most unwanted
badge of celebrity of all: grainy photographs of her in a bikini while she was
on her honeymoon with Dr. Neil Murray appeared in the British tabloids.
She may be richer than the Queen of England, but Joanne Rowling
started life in more modest circumstances. She grew up in the little town
of Chipping Sodbury, with a stay at home mom and a father who worked
at the local Rolls Royce plant. She wrote her first story at the age of six, and
continued to write from then on. She received a classical education, studying
Latin and French. She received her degree from the University of Exeter.
The idea of Harry Potter came to her when
she was in her mid-twenties.
"After leaving university I worked in London; my longest job was with Amnesty
International, the organisation that campaigns against human rights abuses all
over the world. But in 1990, my then boyfriend and I decided to move up to
Manchester together. It was after a weekend's flat-hunting, when I was traveling
back to London on my own on a crowded train, that the idea for Harry Potter
simply fell into my head."
"I had been writing almost continuously since the age of six but I had never
been so excited about an idea before. To my immense frustration, I didn't have
a functioning pen with me, and I was too shy to ask anybody if I could borrow
one. I think, now, that this was probably a good thing, because I simply sat
and thought, for four (delayed train) hours, and all the details bubbled up
in my brain, and this scrawny, black-haired, bespectacled boy who didn't know
he was a wizard became more and more real to me. I think that perhaps if I had
had to slow down the ideas so that I could capture them on paper I might have
stifled some of them (although sometimes I do wonder, idly, how much of what I
imagined on that journey I had forgotten by the time I actually got my hands on
a pen)."
"I began to write Philosopher's Stone that very evening, although those first
few pages bear no resemblance at all to anything in the finished book. I moved
up to Manchester, taking the swelling manuscript with me, which was now growing
in all sorts of strange directions, and including ideas for the rest of Harry's
career at Hogwarts, not just his first year. Then, on December 30th 1990,
something happened that changed both my world and Harry's forever: my mother died."
2
Rowling's mother died at the age of 45 from multiple sclerosis. Losing her
mother was absolutely devastating for Rowling, she has said.
She wrote with great feeling about
her mother's death for the magazine for the Multiple Sclerosis Society,
MS Matters:
"I saw her for the last time just before Christmas 1990. She was extremely thin and
looked exhausted. I don't know how I didn't realize how ill she was, except that
I had watched her deteriorate for so long that the change, at the time, didn't
seem so dramatic. I said goodbye to her and left to spend Christmas with my
then boyfriend's parents, the first time I had spent it away from her."
"She died on New Year's Eve. When the telephone rang at half past seven in
the morning and my boyfriend's mother called up the stairs, "It's your Dad,"
I knew. Fathers don't call their daughters that early except for the worst of
reasons. She was 45 and I still can't write about her without crying."
"I miss my mother almost daily, and I feel desperately sad for all she missed.
She died before either of her daughters got married, died before Di gave up
nursing and became a lawyer; she never met her granddaughter, and I never
told her about Harry Potter."
3
Less was known about multiple sclerosis when her mother suffered from it, although
Scotland has the highest incidence of MS in the world. Rowling's impassioned
essay about the appalling lack of government funding to help people with the disease
caused a furor in Scotland. Rowling marched on Scottish Parliament to raise
awareness of the cause, which led to massive reform in the way the disease is treated.
She is the patron
of the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Scotland and has given generously of her time
and money to the cause that means so much to her.
After the anguish of her mother's death, she faced another
shock: her father quickly remarried. Desperate to get away,
Jo took a job teaching English in Portugal. In Portugal she
met Jorge Arantes, whom she married. She had a daughter whom she
named Jessica, after Jessica Mitford, a heroine of Rowling.
She has spoken often of her admiration
for Jessica Mitford, both for her writings and for her activism.
"[Jessica Mitford] 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."
4
She won't reveal much about her brief
first marriage, saying only:
"Obviously you don't leave a marriage after that very short period of time
unless there are serious problems. And I had a baby with this man.
But it didn't work. And it was clear to me that it was time to go.
I never regretted it." 5
She also shared this excellent advice with her
youthful female readers at the Edinburgh International Book Fair in 2004:
"Isn't this life, though? I make this hero -- Harry, obviously -- and
there he is on the screen, the perfect Harry, because Dan is very much as I imagine
Harry, but who does every girl under the age of 15 fall in love with?
Tom Felton as Draco Malfoy. Girls, stop going for the bad guy.
Go for a nice man in the first place. It took me 35 years to learn
that, but I am giving you that nugget free, right now, at
the beginning of your love lives."
6
Jo Rowling with Emma Watson (Hermione), Rupert Grint (Ron) and Daniel
Radcliffe (Harry).
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After her daughter was born,
the marriage fell apart.
Disillusioned and nearly broke, Jo and baby Jessica left Portugal and traveled
to Edinburgh in
time for Christmas with Jo's sister Di. She hesitantly shared the first
few chapters of the Harry Potter manuscript with Di. Di laughed at the funny parts,
which Rowling says is what kept her from setting the entire project
aside. Heartened by the response, she decided to give it a go, before
turning to teaching to support herself. She lived on public assistance,
which she despised with a passion.
"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."
7
Determined to find a way
out of the trap so many single women have found themselves in,
Rowling would walk the baby in her stroller through the streets of
Edinburgh until the baby fell asleep, then she would go to Nicholson's
Café and order one espresso and one water and write in longhand
as fast as she could until the baby woke up. When she finished the manuscript,
she didn't have enough money to photocopy it, so she had to send it to one agent
at a time. A brilliant -- and presumably prescient -- young agent named Christopher
Little accepted Rowling
as a client, and set out to sell the story of a young orphan who finds out that
he is destined to be the greatest wizard of all time. It took a year for Little
to sell the book to Bloomsbury: most publishers passed on the book
because it was far too long for middle grade fiction and it didn't fit as an
adult fantasy.
"It took a year for my new agent, Christopher, to find a publisher. Lots of
them turned it down. Then, finally, in August 1996, Christopher telephoned me
and told me that Bloomsbury had 'made an offer.' I could not quite believe
my ears. 'You mean it's going to be published?' I asked, rather stupidly.
'It's definitely going to be published?' After I had hung up, I screamed
and jumped into the air; Jessica, who was sitting in her high-chair enjoying tea,
looked thoroughly scared."
8
The book was an unexpected success in England, and
Scholastic bought the American rights at auction. Rowling revealed that when
the publicity machine cranked up, it threw her into her first-ever case of
writer's block.
"Three months after British publication, my agent called me at about eight one
evening to tell me there was an auction going on in New York for the book. They
were up to five figures. I went cold with shock. By the time he called back at
10 p.m., it was up to six figures. At 11 p.m., my American editor, Arthur
Levine, called me. The first words he said to me were: "Don't panic." He
really knew what I was going through. I went to bed and couldn't sleep.
On one level I was obviously delighted, but most of me froze."
"For the first time ever in my life, I got writer's block. The stakes seemed
to have gone up a lot, and I attracted a lot of publicity in Britain for which
I was utterly unprepared. Never in my wildest imaginings had I pictured my face
in the papers -- particularly captioned, as they almost all were, with the
words "penniless single mother." It is hard to be defined by the most
difficult part of your life. But that aspect of the story is, thankfully, receding
a little in Britain; the books are now the story, which suits me fine."
9
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"One of the nicest things about writing
for children is that you don't find them deconstructing novels. Either
they like it or they don't like it." --J.K. Rowling
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The film rights were later sold,
and her success allowed her to have unprecedented control over the script,
something most authors never have. The film's first director, Chris Columbus
took great pains to recreate Hogwarts exactly as Rowling saw it in her mind.
She was absolutely delighted with the way the films turned out, especially
with Daniel Radcliffe's performance as Harry, Robbie Coltrane's performance
as Hagrid and Maggie Smith's performance as Professor McGonagal.
The books continued to grow in popularity by
word of mouth and, as the buzz grew and the movie media madness kicked in,
Harry Potter became a worldwide phenomenon.
Midnight parties at bookstores where children dress up as their favorite characters
from the books were held on each book's publication date, numerous websites
and chatrooms sprang up and then the merchandising started, with all kinds of
Harry Potter goods being sold, from t-shirts to toys to costumes.
Jo Rowling was now successful beyond her wildest dreams. The writer's block receded
into the distance and she gradually started taking control of her publicity, enforcing
limits on interviews and appearances, so that she could also have a personal life.
A friend introduced her to Dr. Neil Murray, a Scottish doctor, whom she married
in a small ceremony
with family in December, 2001.
The couple's first child, a boy, was born in March 2003, just three months
before the Harry Potter And The Order of the Phoenix hit the bookshelves.
Their second child, daughter Mackenzie, was born in January, 2005.
Effect of Harry Potter on Popular Culture
Jo Rowling with her husband, Dr. Neil Murray.
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Harry Potter has had an undeniable impact on popular culture.
Before Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone hit bookshelves, the
children's publishing industry was in a slump. Children were beginning
to spend more of their free time playing computer
and video games. Television watching for children was on the rise.
Suddenly, delighted parents and teachers were treated
to the sight of 8 year-olds lugging around hefty tomes and actually reading
them all the way through to the end. The books have been translated into all the
major western european languages, but have also been translated into such languages
as Turkish, Farsi, Latin and Ancient Greek. It's an unprecedented phenomenon: millions
of children all over the world are reading the same books at the same time: for years
at a stretch. There is a cultural touchstone that has been created, a fictional common
ground that a child from Iceland and one from Scotland could both understand and
relate to. While some conservative groups have complained about the
deaths in the books, children seem to take it all in stride. Children
know that the world is unfair: bad things happen to children every day, from
divorce to illness to accidents. Sometimes those children can't
talk about their own illnesses, but they can talk about
Harry's tragedies, notes Rowling, remarking upon the
extraordinary number of letters she's gotten from grateful parents of ill children.
Click Here for Part 2 of J.K. Rowling and the Extraordinary Life.
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