Autobiography JKRowling
Autobiography JKRowling
Both my mother and my father were both Londoners. They met when they were eighteen years of a train that took them from King's Cross station to Arbroath in Scotland, my father went to enlist in the Royal Navy, my mother in WREN (Women's Auxiliary Navy). My mother said she was cold, my father offered her half of his coat, and after a little over a year, at nineteen, married. Both left the Navy and moved to the outskirts of Bristol in the west. I was born when my mother was twenty. I was a chubby child. The description of the pictures in "The Sorcerer's Stone" "with what looked like a large pink beach ball, wearing hats of various colors" fits perfectly with the picture of my first year. My sister, Di, was born a year and eleven months after me. The day of his birth is my earliest memory, or at least my first memory dates. I recall the picture of me playing in the kitchen with a piece of clay while my father goes in, comes out, goes back and forth between the kitchen and their bedroom, where my mother is giving birth. I did not invent this memory because I compared it in detail later with my mother. I see too vividly the image of myself that, shortly after shaking hands with my father, I enter the room of my parents and I see my mother in bed in her nightdress next to my beaming sister, naked as a worm, with a Lots of hair and looks like a little girl of five years. Although, obviously, I made this false and bizarre memories by putting together bits of stories he had heard as a child, the images are so vivid that I still remember when I think back to the birth of a.
Of my sister had (and still has) very dark hair, almost blacks, and dark brown eyes like my mother, and much prettier than I was (still is now). To balance things, I think, my parents decided that I had to be "the intelligent one." These labels bother to both: I wanted to be more attractive than a ball-by-the-beach-with-freckles, and Di, who is now a lawyer, was justifiably annoyed that everyone would notice only her pretty face . No doubt this contributed to the fact that approximately three quarters of our childhood, we argued like a pair of feral cats locked in the same cage. Even today, has a tiny scar on his eyebrow, as I recall the day when I pulled the battery: I did not expect to hit it, I thought it would dodge! This justification had great success with my mother I had never seen her so angry. When I was four years left the bungalow and we moved to Winterbourne, another suburb of Bristol. There he lived in a duplex house with STAIRS, which inspired me and Di to stage an infinite number of times a play in which one of us hanging on a cliff top (the highest step), clinging to the hand of the , imploring her not to let it go, offering rewards of all kinds and suffering blackmail, until falling to his "death". He was a perennial source of amusement. I think the last time we played the game of the cliff was two Christmases ago, my daughter, aged nine, did not understand what was so funny. In very little time in which we fought, we were great friends and I a, I told her a lot of stories, and sometimes I do not even sit on her to get her to listen. Often the stories became games in which each played real characters. I was the director of these representations endless bullying, but Di put up with it because they usually share assegnavo protagonist.
In our new road there were many children more or less our age, including a boy and his sister whose surname was Potter. I always liked their last name, unlike mine, "Rowling" (whose first syllable is pronounced "router" and not "rau"), which lent itself to unpleasant puns like "Rowling Stone" and many others . However, the brother has already appeared several times in the press claiming to 'be' Harry and his mother also told reporters that he and I used to dress up magicians. None of this is true. I only remember the boy in question had a "chopper", the type of bicycle everybody wanted in the '70s, and once threw a stone at Di, so I hit him hard over the head with a plastic sword (only I had the right to throw objects at a!). I liked going to school in Winterbourne was a very relaxed atmosphere. I remember many hours at work in ceramics, drawing and writing stories, activities that were suitable to me. But my parents had always dreamed of living in the countryside, and when I was about nine, we moved for the last time the destination was Tutshill, a village very near Chepstow, Wales. The move coincided almost exactly with the death of my favorite grandmother, Kathleen, whose name I used later on when I need another home. Surely the first grief of my life influenced my opinion about the new school, I did not like at all. We were seated at desks all day to see the blackboard. Built-in desks were old inkwells, there was also another in my hole, dug the tip of the compass by the boy who had used the year before. To me it looked like a large company and devoted myself to drill out my compass, and so, when I left that room, you could easily pass the thumb.
At age eleven I went to middle school, Wyedean, where I met Sean Harris, the owner of the Ford Anglia which is dedicated "The Chamber of Secrets." It was the first of my friends who learned to drive. That turquoise and white car meant FREEDOM for me not having to ask for more steps to my father, who is the worst aspect of country life when you are young. Speeding off into the darkness with the car of Sean is one of the happiest memories of my adolescence. It was the first person I talked seriously of my literary ambitions, and was also the only person convinced that I was successful, which to me meant a lot more than what I told him openly. The saddest event of my childhood was my mother's illness. When I was fifteen she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a disease of the central nervous system. Most people who suffer from multiple sclerosis have periods of remission (where for a while 'the disease is not serious, or even where improvement occurs), but Mom was unfortunate: the time of diagnosis did nothing but worsen slowly but steadily. I think nearly everyone, deep down, we think that our mothers are indestructible, and then was a terrible shock to know that he had an incurable disease, yet even then I realized fully the significance of the diagnosis.
In 1983 I finished school and went to study at the University of Exeter, on the south coast of England. I studied French, which was a mistake: I had succumbed to family pressure I study 'useful' modern languages instead of English literature ("what do you serve?"), But I should not give up. The positive aspect of the study of the French was that my course included a year in Paris! After college I worked in London. My most enduring work was with Amnesty International, the organization that fights all over the world against the abuses of human rights. In 1990, however, and I what was then my boyfriend decided to go and live in Manchester. After a weekend in search of an apartment as I returned to London alone on a crowded train, the idea of Harry Potter I was filled with arrogance mind. I had been writing almost continuously since I was six years, but no idea I had ever excited so much. To my immense frustration, I had a pen with me working and I was too shy to ask for a loan to a stranger. Now I think maybe it was better that way, because I could not do anything but sit and think for four long hours (the train was late). All the details bubbled up in my head and that skinny kid with glasses and hair blacks, who did not know of a wizard became more and more real in my mind. I think maybe if I had to slow to put ideas on paper, I would have lost some (although sometimes I wonder, idly, how much of what I imagined on that train I've forgotten when I was finally able to put pen to paper).
The same evening I started to write "The Philosopher's Stone", although those first pages bore no resemblance at all to the final version. I moved to Manchester, taking with me the increasingly voluminous manuscript, which was growing in many strange directions, and that included ideas for the rest of the school career of Harry at Hogwarts, not only for its first year. Then, 30 December 1990, something happened that forever changed my world and Harry's, the death of my mother. It was a terrible time. My father, Di and I were shocked. My mother was only forty years and we never imagined (probably because the idea was intolerable) that she would die so young. I remember feeling as if a slab of concrete crushing my chest: a real pain in the heart. Nine months later, with a desperate need to get away a bit ', I left for Portugal, where a language school I was hired to teach English. I brought with me the manuscript of Harry Potter, in the hope that my new work schedule (I taught in the afternoon and evening) was favorable to the growth of my novel, which had changed a lot since the death of my mother. Harry's feelings towards his dead parents had become much deeper, much more real. During my first weeks in Portugal I wrote "The Mirror of Erised", my favorite chapter of "The Sorcerer's Stone". I was hoping to return to Portugal with the finished book under his arm. It did not, but the one that carried it was even better: my daughter. I had met and married a Portuguese marriage did not work, but it gave me the best gift of my life. Jessica and I arrived in Edinburgh, where he lived a just in time for Christmas 1994.
I wanted to start teaching and I knew that if I had not finished the book in a hurry, perhaps I never would have done. I knew that teaching full time, with the correction of homework and lesson planning, let alone a small child to care alone, I would not let a moment free. So, I set to work furiously, determined to finish the book and attempting to publish. Whenever Jessica fell asleep in his stroller, I would dash to the nearest bar and wrote like a madwoman. I wrote nearly every evening. Then I had dattiloscriverlo everything. Sometimes I hated that book, and still love him. Finally he was ready. I put the first three chapters in a nice plastic bag and I sent them to a literary agent; returned so quickly that avermeli must be returned on the day of their arrival. But the second agent to whom I sent them I replied and asked to see the rest of the manuscript. That was undoubtedly the most beautiful point of my entire life, and was composed of only two sentences. It took a year because my new agent, Christopher, found a publisher. It was rejected by many publishers. Finally, in August 1996, Christopher telephoned me and told me that Bloomsbury had 'made an offer ". I could not believe my ears. "You mean, to be published?" I asked, rather stupidly. "It will be really published?" Having hung up, I started screaming and jumping for joy, while Jessica, who was making tea in his chair, looked really scared. Probably the rest of the story you already know.
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