Rowling’s Big Potter Regret

After creating one of the most popular fictional heroes in today’s world, Harry Potter, you would think author J.K. Rowling would be the last person to have any regrets about her Harry Potter books. Her series of books on Harry Potter and his adventures have achieved global cult status, raked in the money for the publishers, and made Rowling a five star writer in her own right.

In a freewheeling broadcast interview with Meredith Vieira, co-host of TODAY, Rowling said she had one big regret, something that would always remain when it came to Harry Potter. She said she never got around to tell her mother about the books.

Rowling lost her mother to multiple sclerosis in December, 1990. January that year was when she first thought of the entire plot, while taking a train trip. Though she started writing almost soon as she thought up the plot, she never got around to telling her mother about it.

It was only in 1997, almost seven years after her mother’s death, that the first of the Potter books came out. There were lots of other things in between her mother’s death and her new incarnation as superstar author – teaching English in Portugal, a failed marriage and a daughter, and living on public assistance in Scotland.

Rowling said her mother’s death had a major impact on her book, even though she had never known about Harry Potter. She said her mother’s death six months after she started writing affected her to the extent that death became a recurring theme in her works. One thing that repeats itself in all her seven Harry Potter offerings is death, she told Meredith.

Rowling said death was almost like the main theme of the books. Even in the last book a majority of the pre-release speculation had been about death. She said she had to answer countless queries about which of the characters survived in her last book. She even had her sister asking her once not to kill Hagrid.

However, Rowling kept her death secrets well. She did not even let Daniel Radcliffe, the actor who plays Harry in the movie versions of the book, know about the fate of Harry at the end of her final Potter book. The fate of Harry at the end of his final confrontation with Voldemort had been the main concern of millions of Potter’s fans from across the world before the release of the book.