J.K. Rowling the writer?

[pegkerr]

Remember my earlier post which examined some of the critics' responses to the Harry Potter books, recognizing some of the threads present in Joanna Russ's How to Suppress Women's Writing? (She wrote it, but it isn't high art, literary, sophisticated. She wrote it, but she doesn't deserve the fame. She wrote it but it's too popular, and therefore not worthy of the attention of people with really superior taste. She wrote it, but it's about silly little childish things (i.e., like friendship, courage, self-sacrifice and death). She wrote it, but it's really just escapism.

Well, now the plot thickens. Now there is someone out there claiming she didn't write the books at all.

A Norwegian film director has sparked a debate in Norway over whether JK Rowling really is the enormously successful author who launched the Harry Potter craze, or whether she's just a good actress fronted by multinational commercial interests.

As cruisedirector put it, "Yeah, because of course no single mother could accomplish all that she did. . . Now I just want to know where I audition to become the next fake famous writer and live in a castle and meet Alan Rickman."

Thanks to cruisedirector for the link.

Comments

[ascian.livejournal.com]

At times like this (read: any time corporations are involved) I put my faith in Occam's Razor rather than human goodness.

While I don't find the prospect of a manufactured author phenomenon especially unbelievable (looking at the way popular bands are sometimes/frequently created by formula for maximum marketability), it's much more likely that the artifice would be on the reporting side than on the factual side. It can't be very hard to find people who write stories in the precise circumstances that Rowling faced, and it'd be needlessly complicated to hire an actor to pretend to be a struggling author when there are so many waiting to be discovered.