Speaking on Woman’s Hour on BBC Radio 4 this morning, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling revealed how it felt to lose her mother before her successful series was published.
Rowling’s mother died of MS shortly before her daughter began writing the wizarding series, and the fact that Anne was a big reader made Jo wish more that she lived to see Potter.
“My mother was a passionate reader, and she would have been excited whatever I did, if I succeeded at anything, but particularly to be a writer, she would have considered to be a very valuable thing,” she said, adding, “she never knew about Harry Potter – I started writing it six months before she died, so that is painful. I wish she’d known.”
The author says that the family did not know about her mother’s condition until it was too late. “By the time she was diagnosed, her health was deteriorating, so it wasn’t just the spectre of the unknown, it was dealing with the daily reality of somebody who’s starting not to be able to walk as well as they had, and for such an active person that was a real privation,” she said.
Elsewhere during her appearance on Woman’s Hour, Rowling spoke about what it was like to be judged on appearance. She struggled with criticism in the early days of Potter’s success, she says.”I found it very difficult when I first became well-known to read criticism of how I looked: how messy my hair was… you can go one of two ways: you can be the person I probably admire more, and say ‘well I don’t care, I will continue not to bother to brush my hair,’ or you can be a weak-willed person like me and think ‘Oh, I’d better get my act together’, maybe I do need to tie my hair back and tidy myself up a bit.”
More from Rowling’s Woman’s Hour appearance can be read over on The Guardian.
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