JK Rowling: a biography – Connie Ann Kirk
I have just finished an excellent biography of JK Rowling by Connie Ann Kirk, and I would recommend it. (You probably need to be quite a big fan, however, because it is pretty expensive.)
What is so good about it is that it is a calm ordering of all the existing facts about JK Rowling’s life and background with no attempt to put any spin on them, sensationalise them or to ferret out facts that are not already in the public domain. It is written from an academic perspective, and there is also no attempt to impose any kind of external narrative – one of the reasons fandom seems to have rejected Marc Shapiro's books, for one, that and the basic factual errors that littered them.
[Spoiler alert] One of the extraordinary facts we learn early on is that JKR, Harry Potter and Daniel Radcliffe all share the same birthday – July 31. I realise any two of those would not be particularly extraordinary, but all three is another matter. Also, you come to realise the role that luck played in getting the books published, then in creating the extraordinary buzz that resulted in the phenomenon we all know and love (in some cases, anyway) today.
For instance, one publisher was sent the manuscript of Philosopher’s Stone – but the person who was due to read it was off sick, so it had to be returned to the agent unread. Apparently JKR was advised that she’d never get rich writing children’s books. And paramount to the success of all this seems to be the wonderful tale of JKR living on income support while she wrote the masterpiece that would make her a millionaire – except I guess it wasn’t so wonderful at the time.
However, this narrative seems to me to be the thing that sold the whole saga. One myth that is exploded is the idea of JKR having to spin out one cup of coffee for hours at a time in Nicolson’s Café – it turns out her brother-in-law owned it at the time, so she was unlikely to come in for too much trouble from the staff. [/spoiler alert]
The only downside I could find was a number of an annoying errors made due to the fact that the author was an American who (perhaps fairly enough) didn’t appreciate certain things about growing up in England in the 1960s and 70s, but that’s certainly not enough to stop anyone reading it. Less forgiveable, however, was the premise that a train journey from Manchester to London should only take 40 minutes. I reckon a couple of hours is nearer the mark.
And, in the strictly neutral spirit of this book, some of the more unreasonable criticisms of JKRs work made by nasty sourpusses are left unchallenged – but if that’s the price we pay for this cool, neutral treatment of the facts, then so be it. It is a fascinating volume by someone that, despite the carefully balanced tone of the book, I believe is probably pretty much under Harry Potter’s spell herself.