When J. K. Rowling, author of the phenomenally successful Harry Potter series, had been out of college for seven years, she found herself at a dark juncture in her life. At that time, she says, she had failed in life on an epic scale. “An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded. I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain without being homeless.”
In short, Rowling says she was the biggest failure she knew. And while she says there is nothing ennobling about being poor, she believes she reaped benefits from her failures. Failure, she says, stripped away all the inessential aspects of her life. She stopped pretending to be anything other than herself, and it was then that she began to earnestly pursue the only work that mattered to her. It was not, she says, the fairy-tale transformation to success so often written about her in the media.
Learning to imagine played an important role in Rowling’s life, yet surprisingly it has nothing to do with the colorful world of Harry Potter she created. Instead, she says, she learned to imagine when she worked for Amnesty International in her 20s. There, she was exposed to people and people’s stories from all over the world that were filled with terrible realities that she herself had never experienced; she looked at pictures of people who had disappeared without a trace, read testimonies from people who were tortured, and saw pictures of their injuries. She learned how evil human beings could be to their own kind.
Though seeing this dark side was anything but inspiring, Rowling says she also saw what was good about people while working for Amnesty. People who themselves had never suffered these atrocities organized to help people who had, because they could imagine what it was like to be surrounded by malevolence. Choosing to exercise your
January 2008 newsletter