https://twitter.com/JKRsBarmyBooks/status/1535916939243053056

J. K. Rowling visited ‘JKR’s Barmy Book Army’ last week and it seems a good time was had by all (see the follow-up tweets about the visit here and here). “All you women, fighting your private and public fights, and all of you who are suffering as a result of this ideology, rest assured: this woman is with you. She’s listening and watching and thinking deeply.” I suspect as encouraging as this drop-in and conversation was to the women in Rowling’s audience it was as meaningful and heartening to The Presence.

I want to note the book Rowling held up to the camera, though, with the premise that she did this deliberately and with intention greater than advertising the Booker Prize winning novel that the Barmy Book Army discussed on her visit. As no mention is made of a book in the several tweets about her time at BBA-HQ or even of conversation about books in general, it is possible that it was the novel Rowling brought with her — and that she wanted the Royal Society of Rowling Readers to think seriously about it.

The novel in her hand is Iris Murdoch‘s The Sea, the Sea. I haven’t read it, alas, but Wikipedia tells me that this is the plot:

The Sea, the Sea is a tale of the strange obsessions that haunt a self-satisfied playwright and director as he begins to write his memoirs. Murdoch’s novel exposes the motivations that drive her characters – the vanity, jealousy, and lack of compassion behind the disguises they present to the world. Charles Arrowby, its central figure, decides to withdraw from the world and live in seclusion in a house by the sea. While there, he encounters his first love, Mary Hartley Fitch, whom he has not seen since his love affair with her as an adolescent. Although she is almost unrecognisable in old age, and outside his theatrical world, he becomes obsessed by her, idealising his former relationship with her and attempting to persuade her to elope with him. His inability to recognise the egotism and selfishness of his own romantic ideals is at the heart of the novel. After the farcical and abortive kidnapping of Mrs. Fitch by Arrowby, he is left to mull over her rejection in a self-obsessional and self-aggrandising manner over the space of several chapters. “How much, I see as I look back, I read into it all, reading my own dream text and not looking at the reality… Yes of course I was in love with my own youth… Who is one’s first love?”

Three quick notes on why Rowling might have held up this title for her serious readers’ attention, beyond “I like this book,” “Here’s what I’m reading now,” or “Had a great conversation about Murdoch with the BBA today!”:

(1) “Love and Loss:” Rowling told Cruz in 2008 that “I did not write only to escape but because I searched to understand ideas which concerned me. Ideas such as love, loss, separation, death… and all that is reflected in the first book.” She wrote about Troubled Blood that “change, loss, and absence” were its “major themes.” The Iris Murdoch page at Wikipedia describes The Sea, The Sea  as “a finely detailed novel about the power of love and loss.” Rowling may be signaling here that she is at a similar stage in here career of writing as Murdoch, the pan-sexual philosophical novelist, was when she wrote The Sea, the Sea, her nineteenth work. They certainly seem to be on the same thematic page.

(2) The Water: Troubled Blood‘s burial at sea on Easter morning of Aunt Joan and Strike’s later reflections at the ocean-side resort about his Cornish connection with the Absolute in its most powerful symbol, not to mention the ubiquity and constancy of rain and flooding in Strike5, make the Xenophon pointer in Murdoch’s title another link between Rowling and this book. Murdoch, a student of the ‘Greats’ at Oxford, simultaneously referenced in The Sea, the Sea‘s title a poem by Paul Valery, ‘The Graveyard by the Sea,’ and the most famous scene in the Anabasis that Valery was noting, in which the Greek mercenaries fleeing the Persians see the Mediterranean at last and weep in grateful recognition of their returning home, symbolically their salvation and victory over death. Again, Rowling is making the gesture so we connect the dots between her work and Murdoch’s.

(3) A Memoir: The story told in The Sea, the Sea is of an aging writer consumed by his past caught up in reflections, outrageous behaviors, and no little regret about “love and loss.” The book is that writer’s attempt at a memoir. Is Rowling-Galbraith-Murray at a similar point in her own life? Could this display of The Sea, the Sea be the first indication that Rowling is writing her own Apologia Pro Vita Sua? Rowling’s work is becoming increasingly autobiographical, obviously in The Christmas Pig in which the story premise is from her own family but in which she also makes a cameo appearance herself as Jeannie’s mum, and less obviously but I suspect more profoundly in the core cause of Margot Bamborough’s death in Troubled Blood. If Rowling is writing up her life story, “listening, watching, and thinking deeply,” she dropped her first clue about that on this visit to JKR’s Barmy Book Army. As she said in her 1998 interview, “You heard it here first.”

 

Louise Freeman wrote on Friday about a likely real-world model for Janice Beattie, Poisoner Granny and Troubled Blood’s nurse with a secret. The Giggling Granny Serial Poisoner also included as an introduction the several times the real world has had representation in Strike mysteries, almost all of which instances I think Professor Freeman discovered and in one case predicted.

Today I want to share a ‘truth is stranger than fiction’ news story here in Oklahoma that could not have been a model for the Troubled Blood story line, a missing person cold case that is forty years old, but for which story Strike5 might have been inspiration.

In brief, a family of three disappeared forty years ago in Texas. All were presumed dead but no bodies were ever found. The parents and their one year old daughter, Holly, had vanished without a trace. [Read more…]

Patricio Tarantino last month found an unedited version of a 1998 ITN interview with J. K. Rowling at the Nicholson’s Cafe in Edinburgh and it is now available for viewing at TheRowlingLibrary YouTube channel. Oxford’s Beatrice Groves posted her first thoughts, ‘Harry Potter Dreaming,’ here yesterday. I had promised a transcript of the thirty-two minutes chat last week and here it is at last.

Caveat Lector! The man interviewing Rowling was not miked, so it was difficult at times to make out what he was saying. I tried to catch the flavor of Rowling’s stuttering, a marker of how new she was to this kind of exchange, but edited out most of the “y’know”s and “I mean”s. I think it is accurate enough for quotation but you might want to listen to it while reading the transcript to be sure the passage you want to quote is exact.

Enjoy the reading after the jump. Many thanks to Mr. Tarantino, to Professor Groves, and to my wife who did the initial typing of this text, a yeoman’s labor! [Read more…]

I’ve been waiting so long to tell you all about this #beyondthewand xxhttps://t.co/24008FUWwf pic.twitter.com/4C33A998di

— Tom Felton (@TomFelton) May 26, 2022

Tom Felton, who will turn 35 years old this September, has written his memoir, Beyond the Wand: The Magic and Mayhem of Growing Up a Wizard, that will be published this October. All the details can be found at MuggleNet’s discussion of the new book. The key details are:

Beyond the Wand is set to be published in hardcover and digitally on October 13 in the United Kingdom and October 18 in the United States. Ebury Spotlight is publishing it in the UK, with an anticipated page count of 308, while Grand Central Publishing will be the US publisher, with a planned page count of 272.

There will also be a simultaneously published audiobook version read by Tom, published by Penguin Random House Audio in the UK and Hachette Audio in the US.

I have read Felton’s Wikipedia page and been impressed by the number and variety of the roles he has played post Potter as well as by his music recordings. The MNet discussion of his book points out that other Potter players have written books, but neglects to say that this is the first autobiography per se from the stars of the show (Evanna Lynch‘s The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and The Glory of Growing Up is more an eating disorder and OCD survivor story and self-help guide than a memoir). I think we can expect, especially if Felton’s book sells well at Christmas-time this year, that Rupert, Emma, and Daniel will be courted by publishers with better offers than they’ve already received.

That none of the Terrible Trio have accepted this easy money testifies perhaps both to their financial security and to the excellence of their brand-gurus’ advice. I suspect that, unlike Felton, who is not as well known as the Harry, Ron, and Hermione players and could use the boost a book will create in recognition and like-ability, the three main players, beloved as their childhood roles more than as the people they have become, could injure their marketability with even a ghosted memoir.

Your thoughts? Has anyone at age 35 written an autobiographical volume that didn’t regret it?

Patricio Tarantino at TheRowlingLibrary.com has done it again. He has discovered more than half an hour of raw, unedited footage from an interview Rowling did in 1998 for a television spot that was only four minutes in its final version.

Beatrice Groves has written a commentary on the importance of this find for Potter Punditry that we will be posting here and I hope to have a full transcript up early next week for easy referencing and citation.

There are a lot of fun facts here and some significant revelations — she says point blank, for example, that Book 5 in the Hogwarts Saga wasn’t planned very well at that point, a note that was demonstrated as true when it took her three years to write it. The fun of it, though, for this fan was just seeing how relaxed and light she is in the landfall blessing of being able to write full time, negotiate with Hollywood types for film money (“Not DreamWorks or Disney — but don’t tell anyone! Cut that out!”), and enjoy talking with a reporter at Nicholson’s Cafe where she no longer writes.

No Dementors here or on the horizon… the good old days — when a child reader tells her she needs to brush her hair and The Woman Not Yet The Presence laughs and is intrigued by the idea. Enjoy!

Many thanks to Mr Tarantino and TheRowlingLibrary for this find and for posting it at their YouTube channel.