Rowling’s real life story is neither as romantic nor as tragic as has been portrayed in the media, but that’s not the point. On her “castaway” interview with BBC Radio Four’s Desert Island Discs, the book she said she’d take with her wasn’t Shakespeare’s sonnets or the collected works of Proust - it was an SAS Survival Guide. She simply liked going to the café so that she wouldn’t have to interrupt her writing flow to make herself another cup. And while she was clinically depressed and living on benefits (unlike the United States, Britain regularly provided them to graduates embarking on new careers), her accommodations, though poor, were heated, and writing paper was within her budget. Not exactly the spontaneous mythological birth of Harry springing out of Rowling’s head.
The idea for Harry came to Rowling on a train to Kings Cross Station more than six years before the book was finally published - a gestation period close to that of an African elephant. And while Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone would be her first book, at 30 she had already tried writing two novels, and had consumed, since childhood, a steady diet of Tolkien, Dickens, Hardy (the word "Dumbledore" came from The Mayor of Casterbridge), Enid Blyton, Noel Streatfeild, Barry Hines, Margery Allingham, and Dorothy L. She was a college graduate planning to get her teaching certificate upon finishing her novel. Rowling has herself described the characterization as “50 percent true, 50 percent embroidery.” She was not, for example, a homeless, teenage meth addict. A thousand or so napkins plus seven follow-up books later, her series redefines the children’s book market and sells 450 million books worldwide. From a fortunate confluence of imagination, postpartum hormones, financial straits, and broken marriage blues, she inks a first novel on paper napkins. In this creation myth, a single mother, Joanne, her baby sleeping in a stroller beside her, scribbles at a local café to escape her unheated apartment. Rowling.” They’ll say it even if they know nothing of Rowling or the mom. The myth is so irresistible that any single mother with limited means writing a book will hear someone at some point say to her in a spirit of encouragement: “Look at J.K.
Rowling - second only to the myth of Harry Potter himself - is how the author created Harry Potter.
0 kommentar(er)
