J.K. Rowling has been doing quite a few interviews as part of her book tour for The Casual Vacancy, which was released 2 weeks ago. Here is a quick roundup of interviews and articles on events she attended as well as some snippets:
“As the writer of Harry Potter, I’m always nervous of committing myself to another children’s book, but yes, the next thing I write will be for children,” she said. “I have a lot of things on my laptop currently, including a couple of things for children – for a slightly younger age group than Harry Potter was aimed at – which are nearly done and will, I think, be the next thing I publish. I have run them by my children and they seem to like them which is always a good sign. I also have some ideas for another book for adults but it isn’t too far on [in development].”
“We do stigmatise teens a lot and see them as scary and alien. It’s a very fragile time of life. It is more difficult to be a teenager now than when I was a teenager. The internet has been a boon and a curse for teenagers.”
“I do have a tendency to walk on the dark side sometimes. I have suffered from depression, I know how that feels, I have an innate inclination that way. Writing does help with that [depression].”
Rowling also talked about the importance of staying traditional, and said: “I always planned for this book to be a hardcover. My feeling is the best publishing style is still with traditional publishing houses.”
She insisted the book was not autobiographical, but rather a reflection of “growing up in the West country and growing up in a comprehensive school”.
SPIEGEL: Middle-class hypocrisy is an important theme of the book. What do you find interesting about that? Rowling: An unpleasant tendency in human interaction is that we view each other with less and less empathy. Instead, we judge others whom we really shouldn’t be judging, because we know them far too little. The feeling that we can never sink as low as some neighbor or a person to whom we feel superior boosts our self-esteem. I believe that lack of empathy is behind many problems, and I believe that it’s disrupting our society. In Great Britain, there is a steady decline in the willingness to be truly generous, and by that I don’t mean monetary generosity, but friendship and sympathy for others.
SPIEGEL: Did you ever enjoy killing off a character? Rowling: No, never. Although that’s not quite true. There was one exception. The only character I was happy to kill off was Bellatrix Lestrange in the last Harry Potter volume. Being able to kill her was a pleasure.
The BBC has been releasing a myriad of interview snippets with J.K. Rowling that she did to promote her book, The Casual Vacancy. First up is a video interview where she says she wished she had more time to edit the Harry Potter books.
They have also posted a transcript of her interview with Will Gompertz. Some snippets may be read below:
Casual Vacancy has lots of swear words in it and lots of adult themes, do you worry that children who are fans of yours will be on an internet site where you can easily download books in one click, and they’ll suddenly be faced with really quite vivid language?
Well, I hope that we’ve made it really clear that this isn’t a book for children.
I’ve been very open about what the themes are, we’ve talked about what the story’s about. I would have thought that parents can make a very clear choice… I would have to ask why have kids got such untrammelled access to the internet that they are downloading… Well, I would be more worried about other things they could be downloading if they’re running amok on the internet on their own.
There is something of Dickens about this book.
I’m very flattered! When I did start writing it I was aware that I was doing a contemporary version of what I love, which is a big, fat 19th-Century novel set in a small community. So to an extent, swear words notwithstanding, that is what the Casual Vacancy is. It is a parochial – literally – novel that’s looking at slicing through a society, with everything that that implies. That’s what I wanted to do.
Did you create it in a similar fashion to your Potter novels – you had loads of research and described carving your novels out of it?
I did, really. I always know way more than I need to know. I have backstory on every character that I didn’t need. And, in fact, some of it was in the novel and I took it out. I just need to know much more than the reader does.
The New Yorker has posted a very lengthy article and interview with J.K. Rowling about her book, The Casual Vacancy, which releases on September 27th. The interview touches on Harry Potter, her life before and after Potter, and more. On releasing the Potter books, and any details or plots, they reveal:
“We coined the phrase ‘denial marketing,’ ” Minna Fry, a former marketing director of Bloomsbury, recently said of the series. “The more people want, the less you give.” Ahead of each publication, she said, “we were extremely tantalizing—releasing little nuggets.” She laughed. “If you were really lucky, you’d get the title!”
Another part of the interview follows:
We were walking along a wet Edinburgh street of pubs and sandwich shops, hemmed in by the construction of a new tramline. Rowling wore a tan raincoat and stiletto-heeled boots. She seemed like someone who would gratefully return to a pre-adventurous life. Referring to the Edinburgh apartment where she finished her first book, the one that she secured with Sean Harris’s loan, she said, “I sometimes feel that everything that happened since I left that flat is a little bit unreal. And that’s where I’d go back to if it all vanished.” She once had the idea of publishing “The Casual Vacancy” anonymously but realized that her anonymity would be short-lived. “In the final analysis, I thought, Get over yourself, just do it.” She is working on two books “for slightly younger children” than her Harry Potter readers, and she has begun her next adult novel—although she has written only “a couple of chapters,” the story “is pretty well plotted.”
When talking about the book, the author of the article says:
“The Casual Vacancy” will certainly sell, and it may also be liked. There are many nice touches, including Rowling’s portrait of the social worker’s gutless boyfriend, who relishes how, in an argument with a lover, you can “obscure an emotional issue by appearing to seek precision.” The book’s political philosophy is generous, even if its analysis of class antagonisms is perhaps no more elaborate than that of “Caddyshack.” And, as the novel turns darker, toward a kind of Thomas Hardy finale, it hurtles along impressively. But whereas Rowling’s shepherding of readers was, in the Harry Potter series, an essential asset, in “The Casual Vacancy” her firm hand can feel constraining. She leaves little space for the peripheral or the ambiguous; hidden secrets are labelled as hidden secrets, and events are easy to predict. We seem to watch people move around Pagford as if they were on Harry’s magical parchment map of Hogwarts.
The Guardian has posted a brand new video interview and accompanying article with J.K. Rowling where she discusses her new book, The Casual Vacancy, as well as what she has been reading, upcoming book releases, being starstruck, and more. The article also includes some new information on the book, which may be read below (SPOILERS!)
The story opens with the death of a parish councillor in the pretty West Country village of Pagford. Barry had grown up on a nearby council estate, the Fields, a squalid rural ghetto with which the more pious middle classes of Pagford have long lost patience. If they can fill his seat with one more councillor sympathetic to their disgust, they’ll secure a majority vote to reassign responsibility for the Fields to a neighbouring council, and be rid of the wretched place for good.
The pompous chairman assumes the seat will go to his son, a solicitor. Pitted against him are a bitterly cold GP and a deputy headmaster crippled by irreconcilable ambivalence towards his son, an unnervingly self-possessed adolescent whose subversion takes the unusual but highly effective form of telling the truth. His preoccupation with “authenticity” develops into a fascination with the Fields and its most notorious family, the Weedons.
Terri Weedon is a prostitute, junkie and lifelong casualty of chilling abuse, struggling to stay clean to stop social services taking her three-year-old son, Robbie, into care. But methadone is a precarious substitute for heroin, and most of what passes for mothering falls to her teenage daughter, Krystal. Spirited and volatile, Krystal has known only one adult ally in her life – Barry – and his sudden death casts her dangerously adrift. When anonymous messages begin appearing on the parish council website, exposing villagers’ secrets, Pagford unravels into a panic of paranoia, rage and tragedy.
Pagford will be appallingly recognisable to anyone who has ever lived in a West Country village, but its clever comedy can also be read as a parable about national politics. “I’m interested in that drive, that rush to judgment, that is so prevalent in our society,” Rowling says. “We all know that pleasurable rush that comes from condemning, and in the short term it’s quite a satisfying thing to do, isn’t it?” But it requires obliviousness to the horrors suffered by a family such as the Weedons, and the book satirises the ignorance of elites who assume to know what’s best for everyone else.
Australia’s ABC1 has released a preview for their interview with J.K. Rowling that’s set to air on Thursday, September 27th. She will be talking about her new book The Casual Vacancy, out that same day. Jennifer Byrne chatted with Rowling about the book as well as Harry Potter and her past.
ABC announced yesterday that Cynthia McFadden would be J.K. Rowling’s first US interview to promote her upcoming book, The Casual Vacancy. This exclusive interview will air on “Good Morning America,” (7:00-9:00 a.m., ET) “World News with Diane Sawyer” (6:30 p.m., ET) and “Nightline” (11:35 p.m., ET) on Wednesday, September 26th with additional footage airing Thursday on GMA.
J.K. Rowling, one of the world’s most successful authors, embarks on a new adventure in her first novel in seven years. She invites “Nightline” co-anchor Cynthia McFadden to Scotland for a rare interview and exclusive preview of “The Casual Vacancy.” This is Rowling’s first U.S. network television interview to discuss one of fall’s most anticipated novels. Her bestselling Harry Potter series of seven books has sold over 450 million copies worldwide.
We will post the interview as soon as it appears online!
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