The Long Road to Rock Bottom

She was born in 1965 in Yate, England. As a child, Rowling loved storytelling. She wrote her first book — about a rabbit — at just six years old. She wrote her first novel when she was eleven. But life at home was far from magical. Her relationship with her father became strained, and her mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis when Rowling was 15 — a slow and heartbreaking decline that lasted for a decade.

Despite her dreams of attending Oxford, she was not accepted. She enrolled instead at the University of Exeter, where she studied French and the classics — a decision influenced more by practicality than passion. After graduation, she took a series of jobs, including working for Amnesty International, who hired her to document human rights cases in French speaking Africa

In 1990, while delayed on a train from Manchester to London, the idea for Harry Potter suddenly appeared in her mind. “I had this vision of a scrawny, black-haired, bespectacled boy who didn’t know he was a wizard,” she recalled. She began writing Philosopher’s stone that very evening. Over the next five years, she would build that world — brick by brick — in notebooks, scraps of paper, and her mind.

Her mother passed away in December 1990, before Rowling ever told her about Harry Potter. The grief devastated her. She later said that her mother’s death deeply influenced her writing — especially the themes of loss and love that run throughout the Harry Potter series. Her relationship with her boyfriend ended and she was made laid-off from her job. She described this year as a year of misery.

Being in a state of fight or flight, Rowling moved to Portugal in 1991 to teach English. There she married Portuguese journalist Jorge Arantes and gave birth to her daughter, Jessica. But the marriage was short-lived and deeply troubled. She experienced domestic abuse and her husband held her manuscript hostage. 

By late 1993, she had fled back to the UK with a baby, a broken marriage, and the first three chapters of the manuscript.

Back in Edinburgh, Rowling’s life hit its lowest point. As a single mother with no job, she relied on welfare benefits to survive. She wrote in cafés while her daughter slept beside her. She couldn’t afford heat. She described her situation as "poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless". She suffered from depression so severe that she later said she modeled the soul-sucking Dementors on her own experience.

The Rise of Harry Potter

Rowling finished her first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in the United States) in June 1995. The book was rejected by over a dozen publishers. Finally, Barry Cunningham of Bloomsbury Publishing said yes. Bloomsbury saw the potential of the book because his 8-year-old daughter read the first chapter the book and wanted to read the remaining. Cunningham advised Rowling to keep her day job because children’s book never made enough money.

Of course, she didn’t need to. Rowling went from a struggling single mother to one of the most successful authors in history.