She remains the character who innately reflected my own nonbinary nature before I even fully understood it myself. With Rowling herself, though, such a tidy conclusion is harder to draw.
And no effort to separate the art from the artist can ever be fully successful when the artist is right there, reminding you that she intended for her art to reflect her prejudice all along. Instead, I think cancel culture is best treated like a collective decision to minimize the cultural influence a person and their work have moving forward.
This approach has already been applied to some 20th-century figures whose art is now almost always foregrounded within the context of what remains problematic about it: White supremacists Ezra Pound and H. Lovecraft , and the white supremacist film Birth of a Nation , are the clearest, most well-known examples, but society has also recalibrated the way we discuss more recent creators like Woody Allen and Michael Jackson.
With J. Many aspects of Harry Potter are already up for debate and reevaluation. But Harry Potter is simply too big a cultural landmark to jettison. Sure, the author is dead , but that idea is about reclaiming agency over our own interpretation of a text. It paradoxically depends on the author having a proprietary interpretation of their own work — one that we can then reject.
The series embodies what people in fandom mean when we say that fandom is transformative: The fans who sorted themselves into Hogwarts houses, sewed cosplay, wrote fanfic, played Quidditch , stanned Wizard Rock , swarmed stores for midnight book launches — they did all of that, not J. Their passion made Harry Potter into the cultural phenomenon it is today. We can grieve, nurse our wounds, and be sad we loved someone who hurt us so badly.
We can celebrate happier times while mourning a relationship we outgrew — one that became toxic — and regretting the time we spent waiting for a problematic fave to change and grow.
In , she gave enough to charity and paid enough in taxes to knock herself off the Forbes billionaires list. It is the culmination of a two-decade power struggle for ownership of her fictional world — the right to say what Harry Potter means. The Harry Potter books describe a stark moral universe: Their heroes fight on behalf of all that is good to defeat the forces of absolute evil. Though the struggle may be lonely and hard, right ultimately beats wrong. For fans, when it came to the matter of trans rights, the message of Harry Potter was clear.
For Rowling, this was no less the case. Rowling completed the first Harry Potter book in in a modest apartment in the Edinburgh port neighborhood of Leith. This Cinderella story proved irresistible, as did the parallel to Harry himself. Like the orphaned boy wizard who slept in a cupboard, his creator had been recognized and swept off to well-deserved glory.
She was a college graduate from a solidly middle-class background considering a teaching career. Still, she moved into the Leith apartment during a turbulent stretch of her late 20s and early 30s in which she was eventually diagnosed with depression.
When Rowling was 25, her mother died of complications from multiple sclerosis; grieving, Rowling moved abroad and took a job teaching English in Portugal. Just over a year after the wedding, Rowling took her baby daughter and moved to be near her sister in Edinburgh. As the series progressed, book tours and readings took on the pitch of Beatlemania. Rowling hired her own PR sentries and earned a reputation for guarding her privacy vigilantly. This is as good a place as any to mention that Rowling declined to be interviewed for this story.
She remarried after being set up with a Scottish doctor named Neil Murray, and she had two more children with him. Rowling had resisted Warner Bros. She secured a deal that future films would hew to her books. Rowling had turned Oprah down once before, during the first flush of Potter publicity.
This time, the author chose the Balmoral for their interview. As the two women spoke, a 1,square-foot suite stretched behind them; a tea service sat ornamentally in between. Her hair was sleek and blonde, her delivery polished.
The 13 years that had passed since her first TV spots seemed not to have aged her but buffed her to a higher sheen. Winfrey did her best to probe personal trauma; Rowling responded with polite restraint.
Rowling had found herself an Oprah-level celebrity — but her idea of the perfect day, as she once said, was waking up in the morning two-thirds of the way through a book and knowing exactly where she was going, with nothing to do all day but write. Her fantasy was to be left alone in a world where she made the rules.
Finishing her work on the Harry Potter books was an occasion Rowling mourned like a death. She later told Anelli she tried to include more — more characters, more children, more details — but her editor had gently reined her in. At the time, this revelation caused a stir that was enthusiastic — mostly. What repelled Sutton was precisely what had attracted many others: the way the author seemed determined to map and describe every corner of her fictional world.
Vander Ark had broken down in tears as he testified, but after the trial, he avowed that he would always be a Harry Potter fan. Blair was working at Warner Bros. He left Warner Bros. This inaugurated a period in which, books complete, the business continued to grow. Warner Bros. Two Harry Potter theme parks had already opened; plans were under way to expand and open others.
Pottermore, an online publishing hub launched in , allowed Rowling to control her own e-book rights and share her writing with fans. But what exactly the fans wanted from her remained to be seen. That was when she discovered Harry Potter and soon became immersed in the fandom taking shape online. Seuss scholar in the audience suggested she consider academia.
Thomas is only a decade or so older than her students, but she still marvels at the agency they claim as readers. Rowling fashioned herself an untouchable goddess at the exact moment untouchable goddesses became obsolete. I do not like to hate, even if I am the object of hate, but sometimes the fire of my anger is too much for even me to hold back, and I just want to shout through the starry night like a blazing comet.
In these moments of quieter disappointment, I wish everyone else could understand this, but know yet another transphobic screed from some famous figure is just around the corner.
The latest in this saga comes from J. Rowling, an author I once revered. Rather than reflecting on the simple inclusivity of the phrase, Rowling erupted at it, arguing that it amounted to a denial of the reality of biological sex—and implied that to do that is to invalidate the legitimacy of same-sex relationships. Late last year, she attracted international attention for coming to the defense of Maya Forstater , a notorious British transphobe. Her coworkers had complained that her transphobia created a hostile environment, particularly because of her refusal to gender trans people by their gender identity rather than by the sex they were assigned at birth.
The ruling brought a furious Rowling to Twitter. Live your best life in peace and security. But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real? It felt like a slap in the face. For years, I had loved the Harry Potter series, which, to me, had conjured up a world in which people of all kinds could live together and be accepted; now, I had learnt, people like me were not really meant to be part of that beautiful realm.
Then she bought her own apartment. It took another year for Scholastic to publish it in the United States. In October, Rowling announced that she signed a seven-figure deal with Warner Bros. By the time the movie series finished its run with "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 2" in , it was the highest-grossing movie franchise of all time.
But it was still a risk for the movie studio: No one knew when or how the series would end, and Rowling made significant demands over details like licensing toys with fast food companies. Writing her next book, "Goblet of Fire," was an intense experience. At pages, it was twice as long as "Azkaban" yet written in the same one-year timespan.
Her publishers coordinated to release the book simultaneously around the world for the first time, putting pressure on her to finish it on deadline. During that period, Rowling was also involved in making the movie version of the first "Harry Potter" book. After the book's release, Rowling slowed down her writing pace. She told Bloomsbury she couldn't write her next book in just one year. The intensity of the scrutiny was overwhelming.
I had been utterly unprepared for that. And I needed to step back. Badly needed to step back. Rowling also later talked about how she hadn't had time to process the level of her fame. She hadn't yet purchased an expensive mansion or yacht; she'd been focusing on finishing her books and on her personal relationships. Taking some time to breathe was necessary for her mental health.
The thing got so huge. After "Goblet of Fire," Rowling kept writing, though. She published two short supplementary books in — "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them" and "Quidditch Through the Ages" — the profits of which went to charity.
The movie adaptation of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" or "Philosopher's," depending on where you lived was a box office juggernaut. In a private ceremony, Rowling married Neil Murray, a Scottish doctor. They had a son, David Gordon Rowling Murray, in In , Forbes reported that Rowling was the first person to become a billionaire in US dollars by writing books. Later, she dropped off the list because she gave so much money to charity.
Rowling has founded and supported dozens of charities with her fortune. In , she said she sets aside one day a week to do "charity stuff.
She is also the president of Gingerbread, which supports single parents, and she has donated millions to the study of multiple sclerosis, which her mother suffered from before her death. Her biggest effort may be Lumos, named for the "Harry Potter" spell that conjures light.
The organization seeks to end the institutionalization of children. All of the proceeds from sales of "Tales of Beedle the Bard" go to the charity. Rowling also wrote and auctioned off a prequel short story from the "Harry Potter" universe, about James Potter and Sirius Black escaping a few muggle cops. The copy was later stolen. The seven books, in total, have sold more than million copies and have been translated into 67 languages.
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