During her 3-year hiatus from Potter-mania, author J.K. Rowling found time to get remarried, have a new baby boy and watch her fortune rise. “Today” host Katie Couric sat down with Rowling to talk about the Harry Potter phenomenon and get a glimpse of what happens inside “Order of the Phoenix.”
EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND IS home of some of the most magnificent castles in the world and birthplace of Harry Potter, Dumbledore, Ron Weasley and “he who shall not be named.” The Harry Potter books have become classics for a whole generation of readers — and the publication of the latest in the series is as highly anticipated as Christmas.
Katie Couric: “Did you believe in magic when you were little?”
J.K. Rowling: “I really wanted to I don’t think I ever did. I always had this kind of quite logical boring vein running though me that stopped me. I never believed in Father Christmas. I remember discussing that with my mother I just never… I never bought that story.”
Couric: “Even when you were little?”
Rowling: “No I never ever remember believing it. I know my sister did I don’t know what it was about me.”
Couric: “Did you ruin it for your sister?
Rowling: (laughs) “No I don’t think I did. I think I just had enough decency to let her believe for a little bit.”
It’s hard to believe someone with an imagination as fanciful as J.K. Rowling’s wouldn’t believe in Santa Claus. After all, this is the author who’s given us sleuths, Slytherin and Snape.
But there’s no denying Rowling has cast a spell of her own — on kids and grown-ups alike. The first four Harry Potter novels have sold over 200 million copies worldwide.
They’re available in 200 countries and translated into 55 different languages. And since Harry’s debut in 1997, the publishing world has widely heralded the implausible story of how its creator — a one-time single mother living on welfare — had done the impossible: getting a young generation of net-surfing, Play Station couch potatoes re-introduced to the lost art of reading.
Couric: “There are college courses, clinical psychologists, marketing analyses, trying to determine what it is about these books that have made them so successful. If you had to say why these books are so successful, what would it be?”
Rowling: (laughs) “Well what flashed into my mind there was ‘am I likely to tell you, so everyone will do it?’”
Couric: “Oh, come on, share your secret!”
Rowling: “I know. That is the question I’m most often asked, by adults anyway. And I’ve never sat down and analyzed it because I don’t want to. Because I think it would be a dangerous thing to do because then I would inevitably come up with a formula and then I’d start trying to write to the formula and then I think the fun would be gone for me. So I’m not going to analyze it that way. That’s other people’s job.”
And now, three years since the last installment, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” rises from the ashes at a whomping 896 pages. But some have wondered if the long wait for book number five meant Rowling was losing her magic touch.
Couric: “Endless rumors and speculation about this book.”
Rowling: “About? Why?”
Couric: “It took three years to write. People said you had writer’s block, that you weren’t interested in Harry anymore.”
Rowling: (laughs) “Yeah, yeah.”
Couric: “So once and for all, what did take so long?”
Rowling: “Well just the writing of it, it’s a long book, and that’s just how long it took to write. And, I said to my publishers I didn’t want a deadline this time because I knew I just needed to take some time not even to stop writing, just I didn’t want to be published again the following year because things had gotten, got to be very intense and, you know what it’s like when a Harry Potter book comes out. It’s not as though it slips quietly onto the shelves, is it? I mean it’, you know, from my point of view it’s quite an intense period of time. So it’s not true that I had writer’s block and as far as being distracted by other stuff, I mean I think I really would have been distracted before now. I’ve been writing Harry through something like three changes of country, a marriage, a divorce, birth of a daughter, unemployment, employment. I don’t think getting some money is going to knock me off track now.”
But Rowling did make a surprising admission. While taking a break from Harry Potter, she decided to write something else.
Rowling: “Yeah, I just wanted to. I’d had this idea around the time I finished ‘Goblet of Fire’ and I just thought I’d like to work on it for a while. I don’t know that I’ll ever do anything with it.”
Couric: “Was it a children’s book?”
Rowling: “No, it’s not. It would be a book for adults. And then there came a morning where I thought nope, it’s time, I want to go back to Harry. So I did, and I loved writing ‘Order of the Phoenix.’ I really, really enjoyed it.”
But I found out it would be like pulling fangs to get Rowling to open her chamber of secrets.
Couric: “Can you tell me a little bit about this book, or will you have to kill me?”
Rowling: (laughs) “I will have to kill you. But, you know, if you’re prepared to take that risk. Well ask me specific questions and I’ll… because it’s hard to… it’s a complicated story.”
Couric: “Can you just tell me basically what happens to Harry in this book? That’s a specific question.”
Rowling: “Yeah, that was very scalpel sharp. He has a really hard time in this book I would say.”
Couric: “You said when the last book came out that the death of one character was quote ‘the beginning of the deaths.’ Yikes!”
Rowling: “Yeah, that’s nice, isn’t it. There’s going to be a blood bath.” (laughs)
Couric: (laughs) “Warm and fuzzy. What does that mean?”
Rowling: “Essentially a war has broken out again and when I say the beginning of the deaths, I mean the deaths that are meaningful I suppose to the reader. That in this what I consider to be a major character dies. It was awful to write. It was absolutely awful. And I cried after doing it, or reading it because it had been written already but I rewrote it, and then walked into the kitchen afterwards in tears. And Neil said to me, ‘What’s the matter?’ And I said, ‘Well I’ve just killed the person that I’m going to kill.’ He doesn’t know who it is. And Neil said, ‘Well don’t do it then,’ which showed he completely didn’t understand that you need to be very unpleasant and vicious to your characters to write heart-warming children’s books.”
Though she wouldn’t even give me a copy of “The Order of the Phoenix” to read before tomorrow’s release, she did offer one titillating passage for meditation.
Rowling reads from the book, “Dumbledore lowered his hands and surveyed Harry through his half moon glasses. ‘It is time,’ he said ‘for me to tell you what I should have told you five years ago Harry. Please sit down. I am going to tell you everything.’”