JK Rowling recently did a lengthy interview with The New Yorker, the article of which is 10 pages long sees Jo discuss The Casual Vacancy and Harry Potter. We learn various new things about her new novel (please note that there are spoilers – things such as quotes etc – included in the article so read at your own risk but also adult themes), a number of points from the article have been included below but read the article for the full run-down.

Jo on adult themes in The Casual Vacancy:

“There is no part of me that feels that I represented myself as your children’s babysitter or their teacher,” Rowling said. “I was always, I think, completely honest. I’m a writer, and I will write what I want to write.”

“I had a lot of real-world material in me, believe you me,” Rowling said. “The thing about fantasy—there are certain things you just don’t do in fantasy. You don’t have sex near unicorns. It’s an ironclad rule. It’s tacky.” She then added, carefully, “It’s not that I just wanted to write about people having sex.”

On her early difficult days writing the first Harry Potter book 20 years ago:

“I was trying to write through that time, and I did,” she said. “But it was patchy and fitful and sometimes I just didn’t have the focus to do it.” (Rowling did write a long, illustrated astrological birth chart for the newborn son of a friend.) She said, “It was Jessica—I have to credit her with so much—that gave me the impetus to go and say to a doctor, ‘I think I’m not quite right, and I need some help here.’ Having done that made a massive difference.”

She began therapy, and “pressed on with the book, and things came together. In my head, at least. Externally, my life might not have looked a great deal better. My friend, I hope he wouldn’t mind me saying, my friend Sean, my oldest friend, he lent me a deposit on a much better rented flat.” (Sean Harris was the Wyedean friend with access to the Ford Anglia.) “And, you know, things slowly turned round.” She finished “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” in 1995, shortly before starting her teacher-training course. “Having that child forced me to finish the bloody book,” she said. “Not because I thought it was going to save us but because I thought it was going to be my last chance to finish it.”

Jo on the period after Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire:

“That was a really hard time for me. The pressure of it had become overwhelming, actually. I found it difficult to write, which had never happened to me before in my life. The intensity of the scrutiny was overwhelming. I had been utterly unprepared for that. And I needed to step back. Badly needed to step back.” She had published four books in four years. “I said to Bloomsbury, ‘There won’t be a book next year, I can’t do it,’ which they were great about. It ended up being three years. So it was 2000 for ‘Goblet of Fire,’ and 2003 for ‘Phoenix.’ ”

Harry was more a character with responsibilities than a person she knew. In the role given to him, she said, “Harry has that sort of Galahad quality. It seems that you can’t escape it.”

Though it was possible to imagine Ron Weasley, Harry’s friend, embracing a Muggle existence, “Harry, as a character, can’t. The person who is leading the quest—it seems that they have to have this weird purity about them. And, after all, if Harry really had gone through everything he went through, he probably wouldn’t be mentally healthy enough to survive anywhere, would he?”

To read the full 10 page article click here