Latest Site Notices

masterofmystery · #1 (**permalink**) 09-23-2012, 08:24 PM

The second of J.K. Rowling's interviews to promote the release of The Casual Vacancy is online now, where she discussed at very long length with The New Yorker about her new book for adults, and some of the challenges that came with not only writing that, but the Harry Potter series as well.

The profile on Rowling is possibly the longest so far, and contains spoilers for The Casual Vacancy throughout, so do heed with caution. Rowling did manage to slip one new piece of information from the Harry Potter world here; more quotes and highlights can be found below, and the feature can be read here.

Quote:

I asked [Rowling] if Dudley, Harry’s cousin, had any children as an adult, and she told me that he had two.

I asked her if publishing the new book made her feel exposed. “I thought I’d feel frightened at this point,” she said. “Not just because it’s been five years, and anything I wrote after Potter—anything—was going to receive a certain degree of attention that is not entirely welcome, if I’m honest. It’s not the place I’m happiest or most comfortable, shall we say. So, for the first few years of writing ‘The Casual Vacancy,’ I kept saying to myself, ‘You’re very lucky. You can pay your bills, you don’t have to publish it.’ And that was a very freeing thought, even though I knew bloody well, in my heart of hearts, that I was going to publish it. I knew that a writer generally writes to be read, unless you’re Salinger.”

After all the fretting—“Christ, you’re going to have to go out there again”—she discovered that she was calm. “I think I’ve spent so long with the book—it is what I want it to be,” she said. “You think, Well, I did the best I could where I was with what I had.” She laughed. “Which is a terrible paraphrase of a Theodore Roosevelt quote.”

On 'The Casual Vacancy's adult themes: “There is no part of me that feels that I represented myself as your children’s babysitter or their teacher,” Rowling said. “I was always, I think, completely honest. I’m a writer, and I will write what I want to write.”

“I had a lot of real-world material in me, believe you me,” Rowling said. “The thing about fantasy—there are certain things you just don’t do in fantasy. You don’t have sex near unicorns. It’s an ironclad rule. It’s tacky.” She then added, carefully, “It’s not that I just wanted to write about people having sex.”

“It’s been billed, slightly, as a black comedy, but to me it’s more of a comic tragedy,” she said. If the novel had precedents, “it would be sort of nineteenth-century: the anatomy and the analysis of a very small and closed society.” A local election was “a perfect way in,” she said. “It’s the smallest possible building block of democracy—this tiny atom on which everything rests.”

“In my head, the working title for a long time was ‘Responsible,’ because for me this is a book about responsibility. In the minor sense—how responsible we are for our own personal happiness, and where we find ourselves in life—but in the macro sense also, of course: how responsible we are for the poor, the disadvantaged, other people’s misery.” Two years in, she picked up the standard British handbook for local administrators.

“I needed it to check certain abstruse points. And in there I came across the phrase ‘a casual vacancy.’ Meaning, when a seat falls vacant through death or scandal. And immediately I knew that that was the title. . . . I was dealing not only with responsibility but with a bunch of characters who all have these little vacancies in their lives, these emptinesses in their lives, that they’re all filling in various ways.”

“And it’s death! The casual vacancy, the casualness with which death comes down. You expect a fanfare, you expect some sort of pathos or grandeur to it. And, you know, the first big death I ever suffered was my mother’s, and it was that that was so shocking: just gone.”

Rowling said, “I did not have an easy relationship with my father, but no one in ‘The Casual Vacancy’ is a portrait of any living person.”

On her early difficult days writing the first Harry Potter book 20 years ago: “I was trying to write through that time, and I did,” she said. “But it was patchy and fitful and sometimes I just didn’t have the focus to do it.” (Rowling did write a long, illustrated astrological birth chart for the newborn son of a friend.) She said, “It was Jessica—I have to credit her with so much—that gave me the impetus to go and say to a doctor, ‘I think I’m not quite right, and I need some help here.’ Having done that made a massive difference.”

She began therapy, and “pressed on with the book, and things came together. In my head, at least. Externally, my life might not have looked a great deal better. My friend, I hope he wouldn’t mind me saying, my friend Sean, my oldest friend, he lent me a deposit on a much better rented flat.” (Sean Harris was the Wyedean friend with access to the Ford Anglia.) “And, you know, things slowly turned round.” She finished “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” in 1995, shortly before starting her teacher-training course. “Having that child forced me to finish the bloody book,” she said. “Not because I thought it was going to save us but because I thought it was going to be my last chance to finish it.”

When I asked Rowling about the period after “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” she said, “That was a really hard time for me. The pressure of it had become overwhelming, actually. I found it difficult to write, which had never happened to me before in my life. The intensity of the scrutiny was overwhelming. I had been utterly unprepared for that. And I needed to step back. Badly needed to step back.” She had published four books in four years. “I said to Bloomsbury, ‘There won’t be a book next year, I can’t do it,’ which they were great about. It ended up being three years. So it was 2000 for ‘Goblet of Fire,’ and 2003 for ‘Phoenix.’ ”

Harry was more a character with responsibilities than a person she knew. In the role given to him, she said, “Harry has that sort of Galahad quality. It seems that you can’t escape it.”

Though it was possible to imagine Ron Weasley, Harry’s friend, embracing a Muggle existence, “Harry, as a character, can’t. The person who is leading the quest—it seems that they have to have this weird purity about them. And, after all, if Harry really had gone through everything he went through, he probably wouldn’t be mentally healthy enough to survive anywhere, would he?”

Pre-order J.K. Rowling's 512-page book The Casual Vacancy now, via:

Amazon.com - The Casual Vacancy Hardcover | The Casual Vacancy Kindle
Amazon.co.uk - The Casual Vacancy Hardcover | The Casual Vacancy Kindle
Amazon Canada - The Casual Vacancy Hardcover | The Casual Vacancy Audio CD