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Scene from Harry Potter movie
A scene from the first Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Photograph: Reuters
A scene from the first Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Photograph: Reuters

A letter to … JK Rowling, whose words gave me a sense of home

This article is more than 8 years old
The letter you always wanted to write

I’ve lived most of my life fighting against depression, and I still do. Yet, even in my darkest moments, your words have kept ringing in my ears and it is high time I said thank you. When I was eight, my mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. She had been raising me alone on very little money for the most part of six years, but for the first time in her life she found herself quite unable to take care of me. I soon became a burden for the rest of the family.

My grandparents, aunts and uncles had heard somewhere that anxiety might have been the cause of the disease and because raising a child by oneself while struggling with poverty elicits anxiety, they found it easier to blame my mother’s illness on the child – ie me. Without even considering the disastrous effects their behaviour could have on the mind of an eight-year-old, they refused to take full responsibility for (I quote) “the monster who had destroyed his own mother”.

For almost two years, I was moved from home to home, like a pawn on a chessboard, from one family member to the next. Not only had I lost my home and the careful and benevolent attention given to me by my mother, but also I was now feeling guilty, unworthy and had lost confidence in people and in myself. For good or bad, this was a decisive moment in my life.

At that time, I was carrying my whole life in a backpack: clothes, school books, a few pens, two pictures, my dead grandfather’s pocket-watch – and Harry Potter. Your books, your words and my imagination were then the only things to provide me with some enduring sense of home. I could return to them, knowing for sure that the fantasy world you had created was somehow waiting for me, wherever I was. I could carry a whole universe within me and escape, for a time, from this small and unsatisfying world of mine, which I couldn’t prevent from falling apart. Even if I now understand that escapism, in that sense, is not a solution, as an eight-year-old boy it was all I could hope for.

I am French and French translations of Harry Potter were always published with a delay. All I asked for Christmas that year was your latest book, in English, and a bilingual dictionary. I spent weeks deciphering the book and producing what would by any standard be considered as an awful translation. Yet I had a project in mind, a goal, something to keep me busy, and it helped me more than I could say.

Writing this letter today and looking back to the child I was then, I just feel incredibly lucky that you pursued your own dream and wrote those books. 

I’ve grown up. I’m now a post-graduate student in English and American literature at the Sorbonne, writing my dissertation on a rather obscure American poet. I’ve completed a master’s thesis, which was nationally awarded and published, and I’ve spent two amazing years teaching French in the UK. Yet, until very recently, even my (small) successes were but failures to me.

When I came across an amazing speech you gave at Harvard in 2008 this morning, I felt the urgent need to write, even though I know it is most unlikely that you’ll ever read this letter. For the first time in months, your simple and honest speech helped me change my point of view. It’s just the beginning of a new understanding for me but your words are helping me once more, not in the same way, but quite like those of Harry Potter helped me survive years ago.

All I want is to let you know how grateful I am: your ability as a writer contributed to make my world a little bit brighter when I needed it the most. Thank you.  

B

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