Chapter 10
Summer of 1997
As I said, I had spent the past few years carefully cultivating a public image for myself as a sensationalist reporter (except among those who believed every word I wrote, even when it was obviously false). This reputation was now so entrenched in the Wizarding community, that I could now publish the (mostly truthful) Harry Potter books under the pseudonym J.K. Rowling without anyone suspecting my true identity.
After Albus Dumbledore died, I thought of writing a chapter in my biography of him, The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore , about Dumbledore’s less-than-healthy relationship with Harry—which might have been abusive depending on your point of view, even if Harry himself didn’t realise this. But I had already accomplished this goal, as Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone had been released days before Dumbledore died—on 26 June 1997. I was sure that not even Dumbledore himself knew all the details of Harry’s abuse by the Dursleys—even though, the previous summer, I had listened in on one of Harry’s therapy sessions with Andromeda, in which he had told her how Dumbledore had finally confronted the Dursleys for never treating Harry as a son, as he hoped they would do. Andromeda said that this was too little, too late; why didn’t Dumbledore ever check on Harry personally until a year before Harry came of age in the Wizarding world (at 17)?
26 June 1997 was the day Philosopher’s Stone was published in both the Wizarding and Muggle worlds. This was days before Dumbledore was apparently murdered by his seemingly loyal employee Severus Snape (although, as you saw in Deathly Hallows, the circumstances of Dumbledore’s death were not at all what they looked like—it was more like an assisted suicide, as Dumbledore was dying anyway from the effects of a cursed ring he had worn—so Snape killed Dumbledore at the latter’s own request.) I hoped that Dumbledore would go to Diagon Alley over the summer and buy a copy of Philosopher’s Stone from Flourish and Blotts once he saw the ad for it. I hoped that this would cause him to finally apologize to Harry for the abuse that Dumbledore put Harry through at the hands of the Dursleys.
You might wonder how I could have hoped that Harry himself wouldn’t see the ad for my new book. I had made enough money in my old reporting career that I could afford to pay the workers at Flourish and Blotts—and even the owner—to Confund Harry if he ever came into Flourish and Blotts while there were advertisements displayed inside for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone . Thankfully, Harry didn’t go to Flourish and Blotts once that summer—as I would later reveal in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows , not until the following spring would he go to Diagon Alley at all, not to get some money from his own Gringotts vault, but to steal a Horcrux from the Lestrange vault. Given how much Bellatrix hated her blood-traitor sister Andromeda, Harry knew that Andromeda wouldn’t be upset at him for what he was doing to Bellatrix.
Once Dumbledore died, I decided I would hint at his less-than-healthy relationship with Harry in The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore —if only to promote my other new book Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone , which described in much more detail what Harry went through because of Dumbledore. My plan worked, because Philosopher’s Stone saw a lot more sales in the Wizarding world after I published The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore . That was how my book got to be so successful that I could publish the other six books and be sure that they would be commercially successful. Of course, as to Muggle perceptions of my books, they had to be marketed as fiction in the Muggle world to avoid violating the Internation Statute of Secrecy—the Ministry of Magic made sure of that. However, less-than-competent as he was (and no matter how much he wanted people to think otherwise), then-Minister for Magic Rufus Scrimgeour could not find out who “J.K. Rowling” really was. Even when he saw me in person on launch night in the Muggle world, he didn’t know me well enough to recognize me with straightened hair when I was posing as a Muggle woman named J.K. Rowling. Only years later did Harry himself, who knew me all too well, see through my disguise at launch night for the final instalment of the series, Deathly Hallows .