J.K. Rowling insists her new book, “The Ink Black Heart,” is not based on her own controversies despite it being about a YouTube creator who gets accused of transphobia and winds up being murdered.
Fans couldn’t help but notice similarities between Rowling’s life and the main character in her book, which was released Tuesday under the pen name Robert Galbraith as the sixth book in the “Cormoran Strike” series.
“I should make it really clear after some of the things that have happened the last year that this is not depicting [that],” Rowling told Graham Norton on his Virgin Radio UK show.
“I had written the book before certain things happened to me online,” she continued. “I said to my husband, ‘I think everyone is going to see this as a response to what happened to me,’ but it genuinely wasn’t. The first draft of the book was finished at the point certain things happened.”
In the book, the character Edie Ledwell gets persecuted online for creating a cartoon scene that is allegedly racist, ableist, and transphobic. Edie is discovered dead, which leads detectives to seek the identity of her anonymous online harasser.
“I have never created a book — and this book certainly isn’t created from my own experience — you know, with a view to talking about my own life,” Rowling shared during an online Q&A, per Fox News. “That doesn’t mean, of course, that your own life experience isn’t in the book.”
“With this book — I had been planning this book for so long and then a couple of the things that happen in this book have since happened to me. And so, I would like to be very clear that I haven’t written this book as an answer to anything that happened to me,” she clarified.
“Although I have to say when it did happen to me, those who had already read the book in manuscript form were — are you clairvoyant? I wasn’t clairvoyant, I just — yeah, it was just one of those weird twists. Sometimes life imitates art more than one would like,” Rowling added.
The best-selling Harry Potter series author became the target of death threats thanks to her stance on what she described as “the new trans activism.” When she expressed sympathy for author Salman Rushdie after he got stabbed, a Twitter user replied, “Don’t worry you are next.”
In November, she addressed the volume of online hate she’s received since speaking up and being labeled a TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist).
“I’ve now received so many death threats I could paper the house with them, and I haven’t stopped speaking out. Perhaps — and I’m just throwing this out there — the best way to prove your movement isn’t a threat to women, is to stop stalking, harassing and threatening us,” Rowling tweeted.
I’ve now received so many death threats I could paper the house with them, and I haven’t stopped speaking out. Perhaps – and I’m just throwing this out there – the best way to prove your movement isn’t a threat to women, is to stop stalking, harassing and threatening us. 8/X
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) November 22, 2021