J.K Rowling has insisted that her newly released book, “The Ink Black Heart,” is not based on her life’s story. This denial comes despite Rowling sharing several undeniable similarities with the book’s lead character.
The Ink Black Heart is a book that tells the story of a YouTube creator who ends up being killed after getting accused of transphobia. It was released on Tuesday under the “Cormoran Strike” as the sixth book. It was also released under Rowling’s pen name, Robert Galbraith.
As Rowling appeared on Virgin Radio UK show with the host Graham Norton, she tried to clear the air about the controversies spreading like wildfire.
J.K. Rowling Says New Book Where Character Gets Murdered For Being Transphobic Isn’t Based On Her ‘Own Experience’
J.K. Rowling insists her new book, “The Ink Black Heart,” is not based on her own controversies despite it being about a …https://t.co/XXD1qWjP2g
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She said, “I should make it really clear after some of the things that have happened the last year that this is not depicting that. I had written the book before certain things happened to me online.”
She added, “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 Black Ink Heart, the lead character is a YouTube creator called Edie Ledwell. Edie, in this fictional book, created a cartoon scene. However, the world rose against the creator as they claimed the scene was racist, transphobic, and ableist.
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Following this, Edie got major persecution online and was bullied and harassed anywhere her name was mentioned online. After enduring the persecution for a while, Edie was discovered dead. This led authorities to begin investigations into the online harassment and search for her internet bully.
Rowling’s best-selling work, the Harry Potter book series, attracted a lot of persecution for the author. She even got several death threats after releasing this book. All this was due to her stance on what she described in the book as “the new trans activism.”
Reading her new release after witnessing all of her persecution so far, people immediately had reason to suspect that she was indeed writing about her experience.
However, Rowling insisted that she has never created a book based on her life experiences, and The Black Ink Heart is no exception. She added that though she has experienced some things in the book, it was not an attempt to document her life experience or anything of the sort.
She said, “I would like to be very clear that I haven’t written this book as an answer to anything that happened to me. 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.”
Until very recently, the author has continued to receive death threats online. Last year, she was labeled as a trans-exclusionary radical feminist and continually received a lot of hate on social media.
She addressed the issue by tweeting, “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.”