Warning: expect mush and attempted profoundness.
For no real reason, I've spent a lot of time over the past couple of days watching various JK Rowling interviews / documentaries. I've got no idea what triggered it, but last night I watched A Conversation with Daniel Radcliffe and JK Rowling (filmed shortly before the release of the final Harry Potter film), and today I watched JK Rowling: A Year in the Life (filmed over the course of the year leading up to the publication of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows). I've had tears in my eyes on about eight different occasions, and was a watery, gibbering mess by the end of the latter.
I can't explain, even to myself, why my reaction was so overly emotional. Harry Potter is hardly my little secret; it's become a cliche to say that Harry Potter got you into reading (which it didn't, for me), to say it inspired you to write (which it partially did), to say it defined your childhood (which it certainly had a hand in). And it bothers me that I feel the need to justify my personal relationship with Harry Potter because it means so much to so many people. I don't really believe that there are degrees of loving something - it's not something you can measure.
I read Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone when I was six or seven, I think, and the final Harry Potter film was released two weeks after my eighteenth birthday - so the world of Hogwarts was my imaginary playground throughout my childhood. Sure, I may have shared that world with God only knows how many other kids, but one of my favourite things about reading is that it's a solo activity. For however long or short a time, it is just you, and the characters, and an adventure; and bloody hell, what an adventure.
There are so many things I could talk about, in relation to JK Rowling's books, but it was actually hearing Rowling talk about them that I think has got me feeling so nostalgic. Being so young when I was first introduced to Harry Potter, JK Rowling was a name to me a long time before she was a person, and when I first became aware of the person I wasn't sure what to think. For someone with an imagination so clearly extraordinary, JK Rowling seemed kind of...boring. And I think it's only in the past 48 hours that I've really understood how wrong that kind of judgement was.
It's a pretty astonishing realisation, when it hits you that the phenomenon (and I don't think that word is ever more appropriately used than when in relation to Potter) that is Harry Potter stemmed from the mind of one woman, and all the personal experiences, memories and tragedies that went towards forming that woman. Hearing her talk out loud about these characters, created by her but adopted by SO many others, and the directions she almost took their stories (there's a bit where she admitted to nearly killing off Ron - this blog post would not be waxing quite so lyrical if she'd followed that through) made me realise how much the work of one person's creativity can affect others. I have absolutely no doubt that there are people in the world whose lives were saved by Harry Potter, that there are people who found hope, happiness, friendship, escape, confidence, strength, imagination and who knows what else in those 17 zillion pages.
But for me, Harry Potter is a part of the foundation on which I built my aspirations, and I think I sometimes forget that. It felt nice to be reminded.
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