Harry Potter Almost Never Happened

If you have ever wondered what J.K. Rowling was doing before the billions and the fame, then come sit down for this one.

Because the version of her story that gets told in documentaries and motivational compilations is the version that quietly skips some of the uncomfortable and most important parts.

It starts in Porto, Portugal, in 1992, with a twenty-six-year-old woman who had buried her mother two years earlier.

Her mother, Anne, died of multiple sclerosis in December 1990. Joanne was just twenty-five years old.

She was in Porto teaching English when she met Jorge Arantes in a bar sometime in early 1992. He was a Portuguese television journalist.

The relationship moved fast… you know the way relationships sometimes move when you are grieving and lonely and far from home and someone pays attention to you at exactly the right moment.

You know what I mean. Yeah, that.

By October 16th, 1992, they were married. Their daughter Jessica was born in 1993. And by 1993, things had gotten very, very bad.

Rowling described the marriage as violent and controlling.

The word controlling in this marriage was not a vague word. It was specific and suffocating, let me explain.

Her ex-husband searched her handbag every single time she came home from work. I do not mean occasionally, or when he was suspicious, No! He searched her handbag every single time.

Rowling did not have a key to her own front door because he needed to control who entered and who left.

And before you ask, “Why didn't she leave?” she had already tried to leave him twice before and he found out.

Which meant he was also actively looking for something he could use to make sure the third attempt never happened. And He found it in her Harry Potter manuscript.

Rowling had been working on that manuscript for years. It was not a weekend hobby.

This was her lifeline, the thing she poured herself into while everything around her was falling apart, the thing that represented a future that was entirely hers and nobody else's.

And he knew exactly what it meant to her.

So in 1993, he took it and hid it somewhere inside the house.

She said it herself:

“He knew what that manuscript meant to me because at one point he took the manuscript and hid it. That was his hostage.”

Her daughter was inside her body, as safe as she could possibly be in that situation. Her manuscript was somewhere in that house and she did not know where.

He could burn it. He could tear it apart. He could hold it indefinitely. And he knew that if she left without finding it first, she would be walking away from the only thing that could change her life.

So before she could even think about escaping, she first had to find it. She searched the house. Quietly and carefully and without giving him any reason to suspect what she was doing until she found where he had hidden it.

But she could not take it all at once because he would notice immediately.

So instead, every single day she would take just a few pages, bring them to the school where she was teaching, walk to the staff room, find the cupboard, and photocopy them a few pages every day while acting like everything in her life was completely fine.

Slowly, in a cupboard in a school staff room in Porto, Portugal, a full photocopied manuscript came together page by page.

Just like in the movies… a pregnant woman in an abusive marriage in a foreign country quietly dismantling her husband's leverage over her one page at a time, going home every evening and pretending she had not just done something extraordinary… that was absolutely brilliant.

Honestly, this is my favourite part of J.K. Rowling's life and a particular kind of brilliance that gets completely lost in the rags-to-riches version of her story.

She later said that apart from protecting her daughter, preserving that manuscript was one of her most urgent priorities.

Her daughter was as safe as she could be because she was still inside her as at that time.

Which means that stack of photocopied pages growing in a school cupboard in Portugal was the most vulnerable thing in Rowling's life at that moment.

And she protected it.

The breaking point came one night when things escalated badly enough that she finally said, “I want to leave” out loud.

And his response was that she could leave but she would not be taking Jessica. He said he would keep their daughter.

That night, the confrontation became physical. She later said she ended up outside.

She later went to the police, filed a complaint, and returned the next day with officers to collect her daughter.

But leaving Portugal did not end it. He later came to Edinburgh.

When she bought her first home with money from her publishing advance, she later spoke publicly about living in a state of tension she could not fully express to the people around her and said that experience contributed to her decision to move.

Then in 2020, twenty-seven years after that marriage ended, Arantes gave an interview and confirmed that he had slapped her.

His exact words were:

“I slapped Joanne but there was not sustained abuse. I am not sorry for slapping her.”

Not sorry, he said it casually, to a journalist.

And then in 2023, Rowling spoke publicly and in detail about this period of her life.

Her ex-husband responded publicly and argued that his role in her early life and writing years had not been fairly represented.

Like… what?

I have a question and I want you to answer it in the comments because I am genuinely curious and I cannot wrap my head around it:

At what point does a person look at a situation like this and decide that public disagreement is the right move?

Is it denial? Is it self-preservation? Is it something else entirely? Because I don't understand this.

J.K. Rowling is a complicated figure and I know that.

But sometimes the noise around who she has become drowns out the story of who she was before fame.

For God's sake, that was a pregnant twenty-six-year-old woman in a foreign country who had just lost her mother and was trapped in a violent marriage.

The day I read about this, I felt sorry for her.

And in a very real sense, Harry Potter exists because J. K. Rowling refused to let somebody else decide the fate of her work. She risked everything for it.