J.K. Rowling, who has received backlash for her views on feminism and gender identity, said, ‘Sometimes life imitates art more than one would like’

J.K. Rowling. Photo: Bruce Glikas/FilmMagic

J.K. Rowling’s latest book has striking similarities to her own public controversy, though the author denies its plot was pulled from her own experiences.

The Harry Potter author, 57, writes the Cormoran Strike mystery books under the pen name Robert Galbraith, and in the series’ sixth installment The Ink Black Heart, out now, the investigation surrounds Edie Ledwell, the co-creator of a popular cartoon who is “being persecuted by a mysterious online figure who goes by the pseudonym of Anomie,” according to an official synopsis.

Rolling Stone reported that the Edie character is deemed as racist, ableist and transphobic by viewers online and sees her internet fame upended, facing death threats before actually being killed. Strike and private detective Robin Ellacott then try to solve the murder.

Rowling, whose most recent Fantastic Beasts movie opened with the lowest box office earnings of the Potter franchise to date, came under fire in June 2020 when she appeared to support anti-transgender sentiments in a series of tweets. Though she denied that her views on feminism are transphobic, she doubled down on her controversial standpoints in a lengthy essay shared on her website days later.

Dave J Hogan/Getty

Potter actors Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint each spoke out against Rowling’s much-criticized remarks regarding the transgender community. Rowling said she declined to be part of HBO Max’s Potter reunion special that premiered in December, but she walked the red carpet for Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore in late March.

In a Q&A on her website, Rowling claimed that her newest book isn’t based on criticism and online attacks she faced over her opinions.

“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. That doesn’t mean, of course, that your own life experience isn’t in the book,” she said, adding that she’d been “planning this book for so long and then a couple of the things that happen in this book have since happened to me.”

“I would like to be very clear that I haven’t written this book as an answer to anything that happened to me,” said Rowling. “Although I have to say when it did happen to me, those who had already read the book in manuscript form were [like,] ‘Are you clairvoyant?’ I wasn’t clairvoyant … it was just one of those weird twists.”

“Sometimes life imitates art more than one would like,” she said.

Rowling added, “If I wrote about my experience as a creator, it would look very different. And I have to say, for example, which I think will be a question readers would ask: the Potter fandom, by and large, has been amazing to me. Incredibly supportive and I still receive tons of love from the Potter fandom. So the fandom in this book is very much not a portrait of [that] fandom. It is of a very … different kind of fandom.”