I was looking for a quotation from the Presence about her liking books in which she knows the author is totally in control of the story (which quotation I still haven’t found — please share below if you know where to find it) when I stumbled on this gem:

“You’ve got to work. It’s about structure. It’s about discipline. It’s all these deadly things that your school teacher told you you needed… You need it.”

The source attributed this to ‘Charlie Rose,’ which, it turns out was an interview I had posted an excerpt from here back in 2012. I certainly had forgotten this remarkable conversation if I ever listened to it beginning to end. It is available in its entirety at CharlieRose.com, whence the video above, and the transcript is available via a button at the top right of that page. There’s a lot, it seems, about her writing habits and priorities as with the above (to be found at 39:56).

And a little biographical-bibliographical history as well. At 37:45, for instance, she said, “I wrote a substantial part of another children’s book midway through Potter that I still need to go back and finish because I really like it.” This is further evidence for Nick Jeffery’s history of The Ickabog’s conception and writing and the advent of Christmas Pig. See 34:45 as well.

There are several great interviews Rowling has done that are filled with revelations that throw new light on her work. I think immediately of her exchanges with Adler, Amini, Cruz, deRek, Grossman, Lloyd, Wagner, and Solomon. I look forward to giving this Rose-Rowling transcript from 2012 a close reading to see if it belongs in that exalted group — and ask you to join me in that look!

 

A lot of biographical detail that we have about Rowling is very helpful for grasping her work. See the Christmas Pig posts on how her ‘Good Mom, ‘Bad Dad,’ and ‘Peter John‘ tropes derive from The Presence’s reflections on and putting to brilliant use several of her personal psychological crises.

Quite a bit of Rowling Trivia, on the other hand, is, well, trivial, which is to say, of little to no value for the Serious Reader. I think of her not being able to drive a car as an excellent ‘for instance’ of this sort of information. Other than speculation that Robin is the kind of person Rowling wishes she had been — tall, for one, schooled in psychology, two, and a great driver to boot? — I don’t see how knowing that Rowling doesn’t drive adds to her understanding of her artistry and meaning.

Tropical fish, though, and Rowling’s love for them — that might be something a little more useful.

In an interview she gave in 2000 she explained that she was not very good at many things, but taking care of tropical fish was one of them:

Evan Solomon: Did you think you had talent?

JK: Well I hoped I had. It was a real relief to find…I suspected there was one thing that I could do ok, and it was write.

E: Are you good at anything else?

JK: No. No, I’m embarrassingly bad at most other things, I think. Very disorganized person. I was hell in offices. I was good at teaching English as a foreign language. I loved doing that. I think I was ok at that. I’m good at keeping tropical fish. Can’t think of much else, actually, I really can’t.

Then in a 2016 review of a 1983 music album, she shared this:

They could easily have been part of the informal seminars on alternative music I received from the muso I dated in my late teens. His parents were Dutch and we hung out mostly at his house, because we were allowed to smoke in his attic bedroom. I’ve got happy memories of sunlit wooden rafters and smoke rings and walls covered in black and white pictures he’d clipped out of NME, while the Dead Kennedys, Jah Wobble or the Birthday Party blasted out of the speakers. Setting aside the fact that I had a pair of very long-lived goldfish named after Guggi and Gavin of the Virgin Prunes, I never became a whole-hearted convert of his favourite bands. Much as I adored him, I didn’t share Muso Boyfriend’s attitude to music: his scorn for the accessible and tuneful, the baffling mixture of irony and obsession with which he regarded his favourites, and his conviction that if the herd hates something, it’s almost certainly brilliant.

So what? She told Eddie Redmayne a year later that her conception of the Occamy’s capacity to grow to the size of its container sprang from her belief that this was true of goldfish. Per Marc Snetiker of Entertainment Weekly in 2017:

Even though the sound of it is something quite atrocious, Rowling explains how she was essentially backed into a corner to coin [the word ‘Choranaptyxic’] after creating the occamy, having hilariously based the animal’s trait of shrinking-‘til-satisfaction on an innocent piece of playground misinformation passed on to her in her youth. (I feel the need to stand up for Rowling here and admit that I frequently heard this goldfish legend, too, and am frankly shocked to learn it’s not true. I hate nature.)

Maybe that doesn’t answer your ‘So What?’ question about Rowling and tropical fish. Let me explain. [Read more…]