J.K. Rowling Tells All

J.K. Rowling has revealed that she decided to kill off Harry Potter’s parents after she lost her own mother.

In a rare interview with Tatler magazine, Rowling said that she was writing the first of her best-selling novels about the boy wizard when her mother died in 1991 after a 10-year fight against multiple sclerosis.

I had gone to bed early . . . but instead I started writing. So I know I was writing Harry Potter at the moment my mother died. I had never told her about (him).

Barely a day goes by when I do not think of her. There would be so much to tell her, impossibly much.

Rowling said the experience of losing her mother had such an impact that she chose to make death a theme throughout the series.

My books are largely about death. They open with the death of Harry's parents. There is Voldemort's obsession with conquering death and his quest for immortality at any price, the goal for anyone with magic.

I so understand why Voldemort wants to conquer death. We're all frightened of it.

I've never said this before, but, when I was repeatedly asked 'How are you coping?' I would say, 'Fine.' I was lying to myself at the time. Denial was my friend . . .

I was hypersensitive because I had a daughter from my first marriage. It was as though I'd lived under a rock for a long time and suddenly someone had lifted it off and was shining a torch on me.

It's not that life under the rock was awful, but actually I was petrified and didn't know how to handle it.