Famous expats |
J.K.ROWLING
The success of the Harry Potter books are so astonishing that she sometimes feels it is all a dream
BY CHRIS HASTINGS | SOURCE: TELEGRAPH & BIOGRAPHY.COM
D
espite being the most famous children's author in the world and wealthier than the Queen, the author JK Rowling admits that she still cannot completely break free from her earlier poverty and the traumatic death of her mother. Describing her life before Harry Potter as a "mess", the writer, who is worth more than half a billion pounds, talks candidly about how her experiences have shaped almost every aspect of the best-selling books. Taken back to the tiny front room of the rented Edinburgh tenement flat where she struggled to finish the first book, she bursts into tears at the memories it holds. Rowling was living on state benefits in the flat with her youngest daughter, Jessica, after the breakdown of her first marriage and was still grieving her mother, Anne, who died from multiple sclerosis before the book was completed. Choking back her emotions, she says: "It was my life and it was very hard and I didn't know there was going to be this fairy-tale resolution. This room is full of ghosts." The writer allowed herself to be filmed for an ITV documentary that followed her for a year as she completed
the final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. She talks openly about her past and is persuaded to revisit her former home, which she rented after the failure of her marriage to a Portuguese journalist, Jorge Arantes. The writer, who had battled with depression, says the flat was "really where I turned my life around completely". Even now she finds her success so remarkable that: "Some days I do feel like, 'Is it real?' " The mother of two tells fellow writer James Runcie, who made the documentary: "I feel I really became myself here, in that everything was stripped away, I'd made such a mess of things.
A graduate of Exeter University, Rowling moved to Portugal in 1990 to teach English. There, she met and married the Portuguese journalist Jorge Arantes. After her marriage ended in divorce, Rowling moved to Edinburgh with her daughter. WWW.EXPATSWORLD.COM
41