J.K. Rowling is now closing the chapter on Harry Potter.
The chapter of her life related to it, that is.
According to this article, Rowling will publish a new postmodern fairy tale book, “The Tales of Beedle the Bard,” which was mentioned in the Harry Potter finale. This new book will be ultra-expensive, even adorned with silver and semi-precious gems. However, there is a rub: it’s not for mass-production.
One will be auctioned for a children’s charity, while the rest were given away as gifts.
Personally, I am no Harry Potter fan. But I like what she did for closure from Harry Potter, and I do have my insights on it.
Foremost on my mind is how she used this book as a vehicle to detach from the Harry Potter world that she knew for the 17 years that she said she lived in it.
I know what it is like to be emotionally involved in your work, in writing. But I’ve never written fiction that intensively, so I cannot relate to her need for closure and neurolinguistic programming-esque disengagement.
I wonder what it’s like to build a world of your own, a fascinating, mystical, one at that? I wonder if the reason why J.R.R Tolkien took to making his own Elvish tongue was that he could not detach from his world anymore? I wonder if any writer got so sucked in his or her fantasy/fiction world that he or she had gone crazy because he/she can no longer get out?
I do know that before her Christian (Catholic) “conversion,” the macabre had eaten up Anne Rice’s life to the point that she was already a hermit. I do know that Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf had committed suicide. Edgar Allan Poe and Ernest Hemingway were both alcoholics. I wonder if the pull of their worlds had been too seductive?
We writers just love living in our heads. I hope, that like J.K. Rowling, we can learn how to cope with the seduction that our fantasy worlds may have. I hope that we can learn how to detach, over and beyond the borders of our imagination.