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I don't know about you, but cleaning the kitchen after dinner can be a tedious task. Therefore, my prescription to you, dear IJFP reader, is to make it both a pleasure and a revelation for the seven hours or so it will take you to listen to this masterfully written audio documentary, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling. The series examines some of the most contentious conflicts of our time through the life and career of the world's most successful author.
In conversation with the podcast's host, Megan Phelps-Roper, an American woman who grew up in a Christian Baptist cult (then walked away from it), J.K. Rowling speaks with unprecedented candour and depth, about the controversies surrounding her—from book bans to debates on gender and sex. The series also examines the forces propelling this moment in history, through interviews with Rowling's supporters as well as with her critics, along with journalists, historians, clinicians, and others who have had close encounters with these matters.
In the early episodes, J.K. Rowling describes the circumstances in which she wrote the first Harry Potter book; this period coincided with becoming a mother for the first time, very soon after her own beloved mother died in her forties from cancer; how she was living abroad with her husband and the father of her child, but he turned out to be coercively controlling, trapping her in a physically abusive marriage. How she left him, taking refuge in Edinburgh to be near her sister, but, living as a single parent on social security, she really hit rock bottom, trudging her way through what was, at times, a psychotic depression.
She talks candidly about the double-edged sword of her early success when the press descended on her home in Scotland wanting to write about her amazing achievement in getting boys to read several hundred-page-long books, while all the time looking over her shoulder, terrified her ex-husband would attempt to kidnap her child if he knew where she was living. Then we ex