Sunday, December 23, 2007

A wonderful story comes from the heart - JK Rowling

STRICTLY FOR HARRY POTTER FANS!!

A sorrow and a feeling of losing everything and being left alone, has been the real factor of the creation of the unbelievable story......

JK ROWLING breaks down in tears when she returns to the flat where she wrote the first Harry Potter book, and admits that even after a decade of phenomenal success, she still struggles to believe her current life as a multi-millionaire is real.

The moment was captured during filming for JK Rowling A Year In The Life, which will be screened next Sunday at 7pm on ITV. Returning for the first time to the flat in Leith where she began writing the Harry Potter saga, Rowling was overcome with emotion on facing the "ghosts" of her past - the struggles she endured during her early writing.

The flat is only a few miles from her main home in Edinburgh, yet she had never returned.

Stepping into the front room of the flat Rowling said: "This is really the room where I finished Philosopher's Stone, here. This is really where I turned my life around completely. My life really changed in this flat."

She explained: "I feel I really became myself here, in that everything was stripped away, I'd made such a mess of things. But that was freeing, so I just thought, Well, I want to write,' and I wrote the book and, What is the worst that can happen? It gets turned down by every publisher in Britain, big deal. It's really back to the wall time here'."

As she walked around her old home she was amazed to find copies of the Harry Potter books in what had been her bedroom, but is now occupied by new residents.

"Oh look, Harry Potter books! Now that is really freaky," she said.

Reflecting on her massive fame and fortune Rowling was visibly choked to be back at the place where her journey began, and said she couldn't quite believe how far her life had come in the past 10 years.

"For years now I've felt that if it all disappeared, and some days I do feel like is it real?', then this is where I'd come back to, this would be my baseline, I'd be back in Leith.

"And if I'd known that 10 years on I'd come back with a film crew and there'd be my published books on someone else's bookcase in this room it's really incredible to me."

Rowling talked about how she wished she could have known her decision to write the Harry Potter books was going to have such a "fairytale resolution" during the toughest times at the beginning.

"Because it's such a well-worn part of my story now, it's a big yawn to hear how I wrote it, as though it was all some kind of publicity stunt for a year, but it was my life and it was very hard and I didn't know that there was going to be this fairytale resolution, and coming back here is just full of ghosts."

For the first time in her phenomenal career, Rowling invited a camera crew into the heart of her personal world for the Year In The Life documentary. Filmmaker and fellow author James Runcie filmed Rowling for 12 months as she completed and launched the seventh and final Harry Potter book - Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows The documentary paints an intimate portrait of a woman at the height of staggering success which sometimes overawes her, who never expected the international fame that her books have brought her, and provides an honest, poignant and often humorous insight into her past, her personal life and her devotion to her writing and the character she describes as her own hero, Harry.

Rowling is filmed on a private jet with her husband, Neil Murray, as they travel to the US for the eagerly anticipated book tour. She also reveals what influenced her writing, notably the death of her mother and how this seeped into every aspect of the books, and why she felt Harry had to triumph in the end.

JK Rowling A Year In The Life will be shown next Sunday at 7pm on ITV1

SOURCE: http://www.sundayherald.com/news/heraldnews/display.var.1924127.0.jk_overcome_by_her_own_deathly_hallows.php