Neither of Rowling’s twitter statements on 1 April was an April Fool’s Day joke or a birthday greeting for George Weasley, with a ‘Memory Eternal’ note about his late brother Fred.
Instead she answered a question about how she “fit writing” into her “everyday schedule” when “starting out” and made her case for the protection of children from transgender activists’ call for transition without parental consent.
When working in an office never met anyone else for lunch because I was using the hour to write, when an unemployed single mother did the washing up at 2am (only once all plates were dirty) and waited for baby to fall asleep, when teaching never watched TV & wrote after marking. https://t.co/Z7SuvCGPB7
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) April 1, 2022
This is a subject much overlooked, at least by me, with respect to The Presence. To her life is about writing. As she wrote in ‘On Writing:’
The truth is that I can’t really separate a ‘writing life’ from ‘life.’ It’s more of a need than a love. I suppose I must spend most of my conscious life in fictional worlds, which some people may find sad, as though there must be something lacking in my external life. There really isn’t! I’m a happy person, by and large, with a family I adore and quite a few activities I enjoy. It’s just that I have other worlds in my head that I often slip in and out of and I don’t really know how it would feel to live any other way.
Her second tweet on 1 April involved children and transgenderism, which I think gets to the heart of who she is as a person as much as her need to write:
History will judge whether Dr David Bell was a hateful transphobe or trying to alert people to a medical scandal, but he's far from the only health professional raising these concerns (and I have the letters and emails to prove it.) https://t.co/siTOdD6CGC
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) April 1, 2022
This of course caused an immediate backlash from transgender activists, to which Rowling made a revealing response after a necessary rebuke:
Among the predictable replies I get whenever I share something like this, the one that mystifies me most is 'why do you care?' Have you actually listened to what Dr Bell is saying about the patients he treated? Because if so, my question is, 'why don't YOU care?'
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) April 1, 2022
Rowling’s use of a Mother’s Love as a token or marker for divine love (1 John 4:7-12) has been the subject of discussion here, especially since the advent of Christmas Pig though it is a through line in her work. Selfless, sacrificial, and salvific love is epitomized by the love a mother feels for her child, love which Rowling has experienced as a daughter and as a mother herself.
She writes because that is her vocation, the calling of the Logos-word within her to which she is attentive.
She writes about this Logos-word that is Love Itself in the story symbolism of that love that best represents the contranatural, otherworldly love within the fabric of reality, maternal love.
She cares about children in the real world for the same reason: in Lumos, in the Volant charities named for her mother, and, it needs to be noted, in her refusal to stand down to the transgender activists whose madness is maiming young people in the name of ideology.
These two tweets reflect the greater part of Rowling’s world, then, in touching on her vocation as writer, what she cares about in writing and in life, and why she cares. As much as I wish she’d swear off Twitter, I can only be grateful that she cares as she does and that she is willing to endure the brickbats and stoning inevitable to sharing this with the World.
And she seems to be pulling back from the worst of twitter addiction, the phrenesis that passes all sobriety and maturity:
Ages ago, a friend of mine asked when I first felt like a grown up. I've just deleted what I felt was a very funny response to a total dickhead in my mentions and I don't think I've ever felt more mature than I do right now, although I might have ruined it by saying dickhead.
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) April 2, 2022
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