I had been writing almost continuously since the age of six
I was travelling back to London on my own on a crowded train, and the idea for Harry Potter simply fell into my head. I had been writing almost continuously since the age of six but I had never been so excited about an idea before. To my immense frustration, I didn't have a pen that worked, and I was too shy to ask anybody if I could borrow one… I did not have a functioning pen with me, but I do think that this was probably a good thing. I simply sat and thought, for four (delayed train) hours, while all the details bubbled up in my brain, and this scrawny, black-haired, bespectacled boy who didn't know he was a wizard became more and more real to me. Perhaps, if I had slowed down the ideas to capture them on paper, I might have stifled some of them (although sometimes I do wonder, idly, how much of what I imagined on that journey I had forgotten by the time I actually got my hands on a pen). I began to write 'Philosopher's Stone' that very evening, although those first few pages bear no resemblance to anything in the finished book.
I was writing Harry Potter at the moment my mother died. I had never told her about Harry Potter."[21] Rowling said this death heavily affected her writing[21] and that she introduced much more detail about Harry's loss in the first book, because she knew about how it felt.[47]
marriedtelevision journalist Jorge Arantesin 1992, sperated in 1993
Biographers have suggested that Rowling suffered domestic abuse during her marriage, although the full extent is unknown.
n December 1993, Rowling and her daughter moved to be near Rowling's sister in Edinburgh, Scotland,[25] with three chapters of Harry Potter in her suitcase.[24]
Seven years after graduating from university, Rowling saw herself as "the biggest failure I knew".[50] Her marriage had failed, she was jobless with a dependent child, but she described her failure as liberating:
Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy to finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one area where I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter, and a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
– J. K. Rowling, "The fringe benefits of failure", 2008.[50]
During this period Rowling was diagnosed with clinical depression, and contemplated suicide.[51] It was the feeling of her illness which brought her the idea of Dementors, soul-sucking creatures introduced in the third book.[52] Rowling signed up for welfare benefits, describing her economic status as being "poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless"
The decision to publish Rowling's book apparently owes much to Alice Newton, the eight-year-old daughter of Bloomsbury's chairman, who was given the first chapter to review by her father and immediately demanded the next.
‘You don’t expect the kind of problems that [fame] brings with it,’ she says. ‘I felt that I had to solve everyone’s problems. I was hit by this tsunami of demands. I felt overwhelmed. And I was really worried that I would mess up.
‘Everything changed so rapidly, so strangely. I knew no one who’d ever been in the public eye. I didn’t know anyone – anyone – to whom I could turn and say, “What do you do?” So it was incredibly disorientating.
’
She had an unhappy early life, with a difficult relationship with her father and a mother who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis when she was 15 and who later died when Miss Rowling was just 25.
She said these circumstances made it all the more difficult adjusting to the sudden public attention
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