For the full four part transcript of the Evan Solomon interview with the Young Presence at the time of Goblet of Fire‘s publication, see “J.K. Rowling Interview,” CBCNewsWorld: Hot Type, July 13, 2000 over at Accio-Quotes’ Rowling interview archive.
After the jump I share the seven exchanges in this interview I think worthy of reflection in this Q&A almost a quarter century later, the best being the last, a surprise comment Rowling makes about her faith at the time of her mother’s death:
The interview starts with a bang! And Rowling makes a few comments that suggest her Lake and Shed metaphor for her writing process is already in place:
EVAN: This is the legend: that it all came to you at once.
J.K. ROWLING: No, no, no, no, no. No, Harry came to me. Hogwarts came to me, not in its entirety but many of the characters did come in a kind of…rush.
E: Was it like an epiphany?
JK: It kind of was actually, yes, it really was. So, I had this four-hour train journey. It shouldn’t have been four hours; it was delayed. And Harry was there. People like Nearly Headless Nick and Peaves, the inhabitants of the castle, were there. Harry’s scar was there and I kind of knew how that had happened.
It’s a very strange thing, but I know I’m not alone in this among writers. It was as though I was given a piece of information and I just had to find out the rest of the information. It wasn’t really as though I were inventing it. I was working backwards and working forwards to see what must have happened.
E: Almost pulling back the curtain to see what was…
JK: Yeah. Yeah. But no, it didn’t all come to me at once. It’s quite a lot of work, to work out plots. I mean, they’re fairly complex plots at times, and that took a couple of years, to work out the whole thing properly.
Rowling states clearly here that in her first epiphany aboard the train — a story she is telling while on a train — that Harry’s scar and “how that had happened” was part of the story. She takes care to explain that this ‘Lake’ heavy moment of inspiration was only the beginning and she had to do “a lot of work, to work out plots,” etc., “a couple of years” really, but the key element of the story, Harry’s scar being a Horcrux was there from the beginning.
More to the point, the storty from the start was ‘wizard boy discovers he’s a wizard and goes to wizard school.’ That’s a transparency for the remarkable Christian content of the work. However much she leans on ‘Shed’ here after tipping her hand, she does not talk about ‘Lake’ inspiration, the unresolved unconscious issues or crisis she was facing before that train trip to London from her boyfriend’s place in Manchester.
But he comes up in the very next question Solomon asks Rowling:
E: When you’re thinking of these ideas, because some of the best parts are the ideas like Quidditch, which is…
JK: Yeah, I loved Quidditch.
E: Did you? Where do you think of these ideas? Tell me about the origins of Quidditch.
JK: I can talk wildly about those. I had a blazing row with an ex-boyfriend. I had been writing Harry Potter books about…about a year I think I’d been working on Harry at that point, maybe slightly less, and I had decided that one of the unifying characteristics of any given society is sport, you know. Almost any society you can think of, they will have their own games and sports. And I decided I wanted to…and then we had this blazing row. I don’t know whether it was cause and effect. I doubt it. But I actually walked out of the flat and I booked into a hotel for a night and rather than sit there and mope about this row, I sat there and invented Quidditch.
“I don’t know if it was cause and effect” but, at least according to her ‘Lake’ metaphor, that seems probable even if she works to deny it with “I doubt it.” Why bring it up, then?
Quidditch she admits came to her out of her Lake after a “blazing row with an ex-boyfriend,” though clearly he was not an “ex-boyfriend” at the time. Again, Quidditch is a transparently spiritual allegory, especially with The Seeker’s role in the game and the Golden Snitch’s resemblance to alchemical illustrations.
Rowling was later to say the one thing she didn’t miss about writing the Potter stories was having to write the Quidditch matches in each book. Was she saying she had soured on the exteriorized story of personal transformation with heavy Christian content? More to the point, in her 2000 conversation with Solomon aboard the Rowling Express, was she tipping her hand about what they had been fighting about in their “blazing row”? A fight that made a woman with next to no means of supporting herself spend the night at a hotel?
Was Rowling fighting with her boyfriend about faith issues, the dimensions of their life together, commitment? What else could they have been fighting about that would lead to Quidditch, combat spirituality in the heavens?
More on this at the close. The Rowling-Solomon interview had some great human interest moments as the two watch the crowds of Potter fans outside her train:
JK: My worst nightmare is that children are going to get hurt in some scramble. We’ve come close to that before now. Apparently the local press at our last stop, where we stopped to put water in the engine, had printed that I would be signing books there. So there’s 200 kids waiting there, and we weren’t signing books there. There was no security or anything. (Many fans, both young and old, are milling about outside the train. A middle-aged man presses a note against the window, which reads ‘Please spare us 5 minutes.’)
JK: Please spare us five minutes. (She covers her face with her hands and sighs.)
E: Why don’t you take five?
JK: (To an assistant) Have we got any book plates? We could sign some, we could hand them out if people have been misled. (A human chain of assistants passes an endless stream of books from the crowd to Rowling who signs them with lightning proficiency.) Thanks a lot, that’s better. Now we’re going. In America, I went to this store and they said they’d seen one person sign faster than me, ’cause they counted how many copies I did in two hours, and it was Jimmy Carter.
JK: (The train’s whistle blows.) Oh no, is that us? (The train pulls slowly out of the station as Rowling waves exuberantly to a long line of fans. An elderly woman waves and wipes a mock tear from her cheek. A young girl runs along with the train, waving with all her might.) Oh God, this is heartbreaking, isn’t it? This is like a long torture. It’s always the little freckly girls, ’cause I was a little freckly girl. They warm my heart.
E: Unbelievable. That is tough stuff.
JK: Yeah, it is. It is. It’s horrible actually. It’s really horrible. Well, you saw, it’s really nasty. So 10-year-old kids there have been told by a local paper that I’m getting out to sign. And then you have the police on the platform saying ‘Don’t get out. It’ll cause trouble.’ So it’s torturous as I’m just sitting there staring at crying children. It’s horrible. Yeah, so that’s not much fun.
Why is this worthy of remembrance and reflection 24 years later? Rowling has always had a heart for children, young readers, and “the little freckly girl.” Fortress Rowling had not yet been built, she was still subject to unpleasant and uncontrolled situations like this, and she was a single mother torn by her desire to comfort “crying children” and disappointed “little freckly girls” as she had once been.
She continues along this train of thought:
E: What ought we to protect our kids from, then?
JK: We’re trying to protect them from our own fears, I think, and that’s not healthy. That’s not good.
E: What is healthy to protect them from?
JK: Right. Obviously we want them physically safe. That’s a very natural instinct. I’m the same with my daughter. My reaction to a scary book or a scary film with my daughter would be to watch it with her and discuss it with her, to be with her as she experienced it. But don’t get me wrong. There are things I do not want my nearly seven-year-old daughter exposed to. There are definitely things, such as explicit sex. No, she’s too young. That’s like giving a seven-year-old child a loaded gun and saying ‘play with that.’ No, that’s another issue. I mean, sex is something we do discuss but I don’t want her watching certain films. I don’t want her watching films where people blow each other’s heads off at random. No, absolutely not. But when it comes to something that is…
E: Because it’s hard to draw the line here, isn’t it? Because someone could read your book and say ‘well, there’s murder…’
JK: People die, but do you care when they die? Do you absolutely have a sense of how evil it is to take another person’s life? Yes, I think in my book you do. I think you do. I think you see that is a horrific thing. I have enormous respect for human life. I do not think that you would read either of the deaths in that book and think, yeah, well, he’s gone, off we go. Not at all. I think it’s very clear where my sympathies lie. And here we are dealing with someone, I’m dealing with a villain who does hold human life incredibly cheap. That’s how it happens: one squeeze of the trigger. Gone. Forever. That’s evil. It’s a terrible, terrible thing but you’re right, I know where I draw the line. Other people will draw the line in a different place and they will disagree with me.
E: But this is the author with a sense of moral responsibility. Should authors have a sense of moral responsibility?
JK: When it comes to writing the books, I operate to a different set of rules. In fact, I write what I want to write. Because of the nature of the discussion we are having, I have to analyze these rules, but when I’m writing I do not sit down and think of it like, there’s my line, and here’s the moral lessons we are going to teach our children. None of that ever enters my head. I write what I want to write.
E: But the story has to be written.
JK: Exactly. I write what the story is. Yes. I write what I feel I have to say.
As in the 1998 Renton interview, Rowling wants to make it clear that she is a writer with morals not a moralist writing a didactic message. I’m not sure that’s a distinction with any importance to anyone other a writer not wanting to be perceived or pigeon-holed as another C. S. Lewis (nB: CSL as she imagined him).
For me, though, the ‘keeper’ of this exchange is the very last sentence, namely, “I write what the story is. Yes. I write what I feel I have to say.” This means that her having “enormous respect for human life” can mean her showing how evil the sociopaths are who do not have this respect, by showing them murdering others heartlessly. More important, though, it means, per her ‘Lake and Shed’ metaphor, that she is writing the story her unconscious Lake dweller gave her, what she “has to say” to exteriorize her unresolved interior trauma and psychological conflicts.
She allows that “other people will draw the line in a different place. They will disagree with me.” There are at least two different ways to interpret this in the context of their conversation.
On the one hand, it’s her summing up the question of what parents allow their children to read. She includes scenes that “other people” may not find appropriate for their children.
On the other hand, the immediate sentences are about murder and the value of human life. What group would possibly disagree with Rowling’s comments about the sanctity of human life? Hold that thought.
JK: Well, I felt guilty about continuing to write, actually, very guilty.
E: Did you feel that as a mother you weren’t…?
JK: In the first year I didn’t, because I tried extremely hard to get paid work. And the bottom line was no state nursery was going to take such a young baby, unless she was at risk. Once I’d been qualified as a teacher, I did feel guilty about continuing to write. I thought, maybe you should just relocate. Maybe you should just come back down to London, where I had lived before, and get a full-time teaching job down there and give up this. I wondered, was I chasing rainbows and sacrificing my daughter’s…not well-being because she was a very happy little girl. But maybe she could have had more toys and more clothes, I felt.
E: As a mom, did you feel like a failure? You’re broke. Suddenly you have this kid.
JK: I felt very angry. I don’t know that I felt a failure, even when I first came back in life it was fairly grim. I felt very angry at myself. For a very long time I was very angry at myself.
E: As if you had, what, let down the side?
JK: Yeah. And yet at the same time I was proud of myself, and this is the truth. And there will be people watching this, women watching this, in exactly the situation I was, and I’ve got to say to them, ‘I do not look back at myself then and think what a loser.’ I look back on myself then, and I’m very proud, because I was doing the work of three people. I was doing a paid job. I was the only bread-winner, and I was being mother and I was being father. If anyone thinks that’s easy, try it sometime. And I was writing a novel. So I don’t look back at all and think what a loser. You know, you’re not a loser to be living on that little money, and managing that little money to make sure you get to the end of the week.
And keeping your child well fed, cheaply. And just always putting your child first.
E: There’s the legend now that you’re reclusive or the press has gone to your head, and now you’re saying ‘No more interviews.’
JK: No. It doesn’t even annoy me. It makes me laugh, it really makes me laugh. It makes friends of mine laugh. I’m not reclusive. There are two reasons why I haven’t done a lot of interviews recently. One is as I say, I wanted to be working. An interview knocks out half a working day for me, and I was working 10-hour days on this book. I could not afford the time. To me, it was a waste of energy. I would rather be writing the book. And the other thing, which in my experience people tend to forget, is I’m still a single parent. The expectation seems to be that once you’ve made some money, you will hand over your child to a battalion of nannies and then you’ll go off and do what you want to do. Well, the fact is that I want to bring up my daughter and that means I want to spend time with my daughter. There’s no way I’m going to be able to do that if I give promotional tours to every country that publishes me. So it’s for very prosaic reasons that I’ve been keeping a relatively low profile lately.
It is vital to remember that Rowling was a single mother while planning and writing Harry Potter until her marriage to Neil Murray after Christmas in 2001. Everything turned on her love for Jessica, and, in turn, this mother’s love informs the Hogwarts Saga’s first books. It does after she becomes Mrs Murray, too, especially after the births of her son and second daughter, but that was a shared experience, which, if Christmas Pig is taken as a gauge, had its own and different challenges.
To cut to the chase, from its inspiration forward, the Christian content of the Harry Potter novels, to include the go-to allegory of Christ’s sacrificial love in the story’s mothers’ love for their children, is baked into the cake, not an add-on ‘Shed’ icing. That’s evident in the alchemy, the chiastic structures, and the psychomachia as well as in what Rowling in 2007 called the “obvious” Christian content and symbolism of the stories. We don’t know what was going on with Manchester Mike that inspired her Harry Epiphany on the train in 1990, but we can be sure of her experiences as a devoted mother in Edinburgh before and after her great success.
And then Evan Solomon jumps into Rowling’s Lake!
E: The Dementors, um, they are the personification of depression. (JK – Mmm hmm.) Now, I hate making biographical links between characters and authors but that’s (laughing)…
JK: You might as well. (Laughs) Go for it.
E: But there is a biographical link and we’ve talked about it, about a depression in your life being, not just obviously a horrible time, but something in the end that was important to your life.
JK: Um, I was depressed, um, I’d say – would it be 1994 – I did suffer a spell of what I was told was clinical depression. I don’t know, I was told it was. Yeah, I was depressed for a while. I’m not ashamed of that, plenty of people get depressed and I’ve never suffered from it again and I got through it. But the Dementors, uh, it’s so hard to trace the origin of something. I saw these things and I knew what I wanted them to do, but they became, as I really thought about what they did, I realized that’s what I was doing. That’s normally the way it happens with me. I don’t consciously think ‘And now, I will create the personification of depression’ but as I’m creating them I realize what I’m doing. You know, what unconsciously is going on. So they create an absence of feeling, which is my experience of depression. It is an absence…
E: That is your definition of it.
JK: (Nods) Mmm.
E: Now, would you say for you, you know, every, lives have so many crucial moments in them, but that for you, was that a crucial moment in your life, a turning point in your life?
JK: Having a depression?
E: Yeah, I mean, was that sort of rock bottom? (JK pauses in thought.) What happened? Now this is after your marriage, right?
JK: Yeah. Yeah. It was, I think it was what you would call a reactionary depression, as in certain things happen to you, and that was your reaction, obviously. I think a lot of, I had a very turbulent few years. I moved country twice. My mother died. That was the big thing. Nothing was bigger than my mother dying.
E: Right. And you were 25?
JK: I was 25. That started this sort of train of mishaps and misadventures. I got married. We got separated. We got divorced. Having my daughter was a wonderful thing, but it’s an enormous responsibility, and I was worried. I was continually worried about being that broke and, you know, and bringing up a daughter.
Three quick notes:
(1) Hats off to Evan Solomon for going there with a brazenly Fourth Generation question, even if Rowling had previously admitted the Dementors were her exteriorization of clinical depression.
(2) Again, Rowling speaks from within her Lake and Shed’ metaphor about the sources of her inspiration here, saying it’s not a “conscious” process but the fruit of “what is unconsciously going on,” which she can then see for what it is.
(3) Rowling asserts that her life blew up from the “depth charge” of her mother’s death at the end of 1990. Recall, though, that she was still living with Manchester Mike at that time, she hadn’t yet had the “blazing row” that fostered her Quidditch inspiration, nor had she had the final break with him after a relationship that had lasted, off and on, for seven years. She doesn’t decide to go to Porto in the wake of that relationship’s dissolution which is almost a year after her mother’s death.
No, I’m not trying to diminish Anne Rowling’s death at 45 from MS. Rowling had known her mother was terminally ill, though, for the better part of a decade and she was not showing any signs of improvement. That “ex-boyfriend” and the ups and downs of that relationship, I think, not to mention her childhood agonies due to her father Peter, is a much more likely source of Rowling’s core inspiration for the Potter novels than Anne Rowling’s death.
And then Solomon drops the bomb, which question closes the interview and yields the most frequently quoted words from Rowling in this Q&A:
E: When you talk about dealing with death and loss in the books, does this come out of your own – you’ve had loss with the loss of your mother – did it come out of a personal spirituality? I mean, are you are religious person? Does your spirituality come from a certain place?
JK: I do believe in God. That seems to offend the South Carolinians more than almost anything else. I think they would find it…well that is my limited experience, that they have more of a problem with me believing in God than they would have if I was an unrepentant atheist.
E: You do believe in God.
JK: Yeah. Yeah.
E: In magic and…
JK: Magic in the sense in which it happens in my books, no, I don’t believe. I don’t believe in that. No. No. This is so frustrating. Again, there is so much I would like to say, and come back when I’ve written book seven. But then maybe you won’t need to even say it ’cause you’ll have found it out anyway. You’ll have read it.
E: But in your own life, I mean, are you a churchgoer?
JK: (Nods) Mmm hmm. Well I go more than to weddings and christenings. Yes, I do.
E: And in your own life, would the church and that kind of spirituality help you deal with the loss of your mum?
JK: No, actually it didn’t at the time. No. (Shakes her head)
E: So you’ve come back to it.
JK: Yeah, I would say so. I have some problems with conventional organized religion. Some problems. (Long pause) But…but, yes, it’s a place I would go to in a time of trouble. It probably is a place I would go to in a time of trouble. I wouldn’t expect it to provide all the answers, ’cause I would expect to find some of those within me.
E: Right, but the institutional side of it, you know, the rules…
JK: I have certain problems with some aspects of that. Yes I do.
This closing exchange to the interview is worthy of its own post and I will be returning to it soon in another context. For now, three quick points:
(1) Rowling puts down a marker that the Christian content of the story will be evident to everyone by the conclusion of the seventh novel and perhaps not until then. Her belief in God — ot her disbelief — will be “obvious” then to everyone because “you’ll have read it.” Again, the point is the Christian content of the books is the cake, not the icing.
(2) She is very clear, however, that the church “and that kind of spirituality” at the time of her mother’s death did not help her deal with that grief. Her Harry Potter inspiration in the summer of 1990 with all its allegorical and anagogical content is clearly Christian. By the end of that year when Anne Rowling dies, her church-goer’s faith “didn’t [help] at the time. No. (Shakes her head.)’ This could mean without straining one’s imagination that Rowling thought of herself as “spiritual, not religious” in the same way she insists that she is writing “moral” stories without ever being “moralistic.”
(3) It could also mean, though, that Rowling in her relationship struggles with Manchester Mike that led to the Harry Potter and Quidditch epiphanies and her mother’s death had done something that she knew put her outside the church bounds, the “rules” of “conventional organized religion.” What could that be in the remarkably broad umbrella of the Anglican Church?
If you’ve been holding the thought from above about what “other people” might “disagree” with her about “drawing the lines” with respect to the sanctity of life, I think you’ll see one possible decision she might have made that most “church-goers” would think worthy of excommunication. Can one write simultaneously a book that is implicitly Christian that also serves as an apologetic for a woman’s “right” to murder a child growing in her womb? Stay tuned!
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