I suspect most readers will consider this story click-bait about a click-bait story in the UK Daily Mail.
I’m not sure we really do click-bait stories, if ‘Black Severus’ pieces or posts about the Hallmarked Man publication date would qualify (they draw a lot more readers than, say, Pregnancy Trap deep dives).
But, if we did, I could justify this three-point discussion of the Daily Mail profile of Dr Neil Murray, husband of Joanne Murray, aka ‘J. K. Rowling’ and ‘Robert Galbraith,’ her writing pseudonyms. It fits right into our ‘Lake and Shed’ Fourth Generation focus here at Hogwarts Professor.
My three points are that the article involved more than just a Google search, that it still missed quite a bit, and that it’s importance has little to do what it reported and failed to report.
(1) Not Bad! The article covers almost everything a Google search will reveal — all the information touching on his famous wife — and includes one point that I had only heard from Nick Jeffery in private conversation:
In 2011 he was working as a GP in Ormiston, on the outskirts of Edinburgh, where practice documents noted his interests: ‘Pain management (including acupuncture), dermatology (skin problems), homeopathy and drug misuse management.’
That involved no little digging, so it’s worth a read. Again, here’s the link.
(2) Whoops! Having acknowledged the article wasn’t written in half an hour, I am obliged to note there are notable pieces missing. Three come to mind and I suspect there are many more. Rowling has said, for example, that her husband was raised in a strict Protestant sect in which dancing was not allowed. No mention of that or of his mother Barbara, to whom Troubled Blood is dedicated and who seems a fascinating character: “demon bridge-player and world’s best mother-in-law.” A weird person to leave out of a profile, right? (None of the book dedications or ‘Acknowledgments’ to her husband are mentioned.)
The biggest omission, though, is that the reporter failed to mention Dr Murray’s twixter page, @Slowfinger45, aka ‘Dr Slowfinger.’ Just reading his subtext — “Better to walk alone than with the crowd in the wrong direction. Biology is real. Sex matters, and so does Evidence based Medicine” — would have raised two important question for readers. The good doctor’s interest in acupuncture and homeopathy mentioned above for one thing is unusually broad minded for someone waving the flag for “Evidence based Medicine,” and, for another, Mrs Murray’s resistance to “transgender” activists is not just a view the two share but one which may have its point of origin in her spouse’s professional opinion and experiences as a doctor.
(3) So What? The reason I think this story is of interest to serious readers of Rowling-Galbraith does not spring from its proficiencies and deficiencies as a work of journalism. It’s a ho-hum profile. I write about it because, at long last, even the tabloid press is realizing that J. K. Rowling, uber-author and political activist, is a human being with a background and influential relationships past and present that color what she thinks and writes.
I ‘get’ that the Daily Mail staff writer was probably assigned this story because they must have a new Rowling story twice a month and January has been slow so far on the Twixter end. Her name has to be in competition with the Kardashian Krew for most effective click-bait.
Even allowing for that, however, we’re seeing a drift into the realm of “critical biography” concerns in the public media that we haven’t had before via this profile of Dr Murray, weak as it is. I expect sooner than later better papers will begin to connect the dots between the Murray’s extraordinary marriage in light of gender roles and relative prominence, as we have here, and the theme of vocation vs relationship that dominates the Strike-Ellacott relationship and which is reflected in the “gender identity” controversy and Mrs Murray’s role in it.
The problem is that the reporter who worked on this piece knows relatively little about her work post Potter and is oblivious to its relevance consequently. I hope that soon the legacy media will become aware and realize the importance of Rowling’s repeated discussion of her ‘Lake and Shed’ metaphor for how she writes — and get to work chasing down the unresolved issues in her life or just finding ‘Michael.’
Until they wake up to those far more interesting aspects of the good doctor Murray and of the seeming dea ex machina Rowling-Galbraith (Bea Groves’ discussion of the meaning of ‘Galbraith’ would be a good place to start, I think), we’re left with the encouraging interest in her personal life. Why none of them have gone to Tutshill, Exeter, Manchester, or Porto to get that story I confess to not understanding — but I’ll take this Daily Mail article as an indicator that we’re moving toward a big reveal of her past in due time.
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