Here are a few of the 10 questions about Harry Potter.
Did Harry die?
Rowling wrote this very carefully, so it could be read two ways. "Did he just go into a state of unconsciousness in which his subconscious tells him everything he needs to know? Dumbledore doesn't tell him anything he couldn't have figured out with some educated guesses." But in her mind, Harry entered a limbo between life and death, and faced a choice about which way to go.
What was that creature in the corner at King's Cross?
"Harry's impulse, to the point of utter wrongheadedness, is to save. His deepest nature is to try and save, even when he's wrong to do so, when he's led into traps — 'I've got to save, I've got to try to protect' — because he's been left with this very demanding legacy of his mother's that she sacrificed herself for him and now he goes off and tries to save as many people as he can."
Who does Draco Malfoy marry?
Astoria Greengrass, younger sister of the Greengrass family. We meet Daphne Greengrass, part of Pansy Parkinson's Slytherin posse, in Book V when Hermione takes her O.W.L.s. Neville marries Hannah Abbott, who becomes the owner of The Leaky Cauldron. "I do have it all worked out in my mind because I couldn't stop myself doing that."
Here are some excerpts from the interview.
"I can only say, and many of my more militant fans will find this almost impossible to believe," she says, "but I don't think anyone has mourned more than I have. It's left the most enormous gaping hole in my life."
It turns out that Rowling, like her hero, is a Seeker. She talks about having a great religious curiosity, going back to childhood. "No one in my family was a believer. But I was very drawn to faith, even while doubting," she says. "I certainly had this need for something that I wasn't getting at home, so I was the one who went out looking for religion." As a girl, she would go to church by herself. She still attends regularly, and her children were all christened.
What will happen when her two younger children a decade from now discover the stories for themselves and know that Mom has the power to make more of them? "There have been times since finishing, weak moments," she says, "when I've said, 'Yeah, all right,' to the eighth novel." But she's convinced she's doing the right thing to take some time away, do something else. She's working on two projects now, an adult novel and a "political fairy tale." "If, and it's a big if, I ever write an eighth book about the [wizarding ] world, I doubt that Harry would be the central character," she says. "I feel like I've already told his story. But these are big ifs. Let's give it 10 years and see how we feel then."
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