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A year in the life of J. K. Rowling

I should state up-front that I’m not a Harry Potter expert. I’ve seen all of the films, and I’ve read one of the books, which I enjoyed — but I’m not the person to go to if you want a detailed exposition as to what makes a Slytherin different from a Hufflepuff. (Are those the right names?)

Consequently, I’ve never been an expert on J. K. Rowling. I mean, I know what she looks like, and I vaguely knew the parts of her story that have filtered through to the general public consciousness — the fact that she wrote the first

Harry Potter book as a single mother living in Scotland, the fact that she’s now married and has more children. If you’d asked me to describe her, though, the first thing that would have sprung to my mind would probably have been this funny, but as it turns out very unfair, parody that Brit comedian Jennifer Saunders did of her for a French and Saunders Potter parody in 2003 (Jennifer first appears in Rowling-drag at 0:44):

The documentary A Year in the Life … J. K. Rowling

first aired in the U.K. on December 30, and during its 60 minutes, it did quite a lot to dispel my ignorance. It also did quite a lot to make me like its subject matter. Following the author over a year as she completed the last book in the Harry Potter series, it showed her talking in an open, matter-of-fact way about her Christian faith (and religious doubts), as well as her ideas about courage, heroism and evil. It showed her in school photos as a child with brown hair and freckles, and it discussed her difficult upbringing (her mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, while she had a tense relationship with her father, whom she no longer speaks to).

It gave an idea of the public demands of her current life — from live book-readings to hundreds of expectant children, to press launches, to supervising plans for a Harry Potter theme park (where she confessed it felt very odd, as a former secretary, to have other people looking to her as the most important person in the room), to running her own charity and sifting through a constant influx of letters asking for money. The most moving part of the documentary took Rowling back to the flat in Leith where she lived after the breakup of her first marriage, having returned from Portugal with a baby daughter, and, in her words, “made such a mess of things.”

Standing in the flat, through floods of tears, she says:

“This is really where I turned my life around completely. My life really changed in this flat. […] Because it’s such a well-worn part of my story now, it’s a big yawn to hear how I wrote it, as though it was all some kind of publicity stunt for a year. But it was my life and it was very hard and I didn’t know that there was going to be this fairy-tale resolution — and coming back here is just full of ghosts. […] For years now, I’ve felt that if it all disappeared — and some days I do feel like ‘is it real?’ — then this is where I’d come back to, this would be my base line, I’d be back in Leith.”

Prior to seeing this documentary, the one “beef” that I’d always had with J. K. Rowling was the fact that her huge, multiracial, multispecies world didn’t seem to include any gay characters. It was all very well to hear Harry and Hermione banging on about discrimination against elves and giants, but what about the discrimination that exists in the real world?

Of course, Rowling then went on to make her revelation about Dumbledore, and so Hogwarts is officially no longer a heterosexuals-only universe. One of the interesting moments in this documentary (which was obviously filmed before Rowling made her big revelation in NYC in October 2007) comes when the interviewer asks her if Charlie is gay (Harry experts, you may know who Charlie is). Rowling replies no, but says that

“Dumbledore’s gay. I told a reader that once and I thought she was gonna slap me. But I always saw Dumbledore as gay.”

You can view the relevant clip here, starting at about 7:35:

She is shown drawing up a detailed family tree for the futures of the Potters and the Weasleys. Watching her blithely marrying off Harry and his classmates, I couldn’t help hoping that the children’s writers after Rowling will go further than she has done, and acknowledge that somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of the kids at Hogwarts would have been dealing with homosexuality — not just their one ancient headmaster. But making Dumbledore gay was unquestionably a huge step, and, combined with her thoughtful, down-to-earth demeanor in interviews, it left me feeling that J. K. Rowling is an unusually likeable person, as well as a hugely successful writer.

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