Atear slowly trickles down J K Rowling's cheek.
She is sitting in her large and comfortable drawing room in the
Morningside area of Edinburgh, recalling the most traumatising
moment of her life. It was the day her mother, Anne, died aged 45 after a 10-year
battle against multiple sclerosis. A small part of her agony is that
her mother never knew she was writing Harry Potter, let alone that
she would become the most successful author on earth. "The night she died I had been staying with my
boyfriend's family, the first time I had ever spent Christmas
away from home. I had gone to bed early, ostensibly to watch The Man
Who Would Be King, but instead I started writing. "So I know I was writing Harry Potter at the moment my
mother died. I had never told her about Harry Potter. "Dad called me at seven o'clock the next morning and I
just knew what had happened before he spoke. As I ran downstairs, I
had that kind of white noise panic in my head but could not grasp
the enormity of my mother having died." It was New
Year's Day 1991 and Joanne Rowling, then 25, and her boyfriend
piled into his car and drove to her parents' home in Wales. "I was alternately a wreck and then in total denial. At some
point on the car journey, I can remember thinking: 'Let's
pretend it hasn't happened,' because that was a way to get
through the next 10 minutes." Rowling is startled by
her tears. She is naturally reserved and very private. She is also
very ordered and in control. She dabs a proffered napkin to her eyes
and pauses before continuing: "Barely a day goes by when I do
not think of her. There would be so much to tell her, impossibly
much." A priority in her life now is to raise funds for
research into MS, which confined her mother to a wheelchair in her
final days. "She was so young and so fit. To have your body in
rebellion against you is a dreadful thing to witness, let alone
suffer," says Rowling, now patron of the MS Society Scotland. On March 17, she will host a fundraising masked ball at Stirling
Castle; one of the many attractions will be a treasure hunt with
clues set by her. Her mother's condition forged her own
psychological strengths and vulnerabilities, as well as leading her
to make Harry Potter suffer the death of his parents. Her orphaned schoolboy with his trademark specs has become one of
the most successful characters in children's literature,
selling 300 million books in 63 countries; some of the Harry Potter
books have sold three million copies within 48 hours of going on
sale. Death is the key to understanding J K Rowling. Her
greatest fear - and she is completely unhesitant about this - is of
someone she loves dying. "My books are largely about death.
They open with the death of Harry's parents. There is
Voldemort's obsession with conquering death and his quest for
immortality at any price, the goal of anyone with magic. "I so understand why Voldemort wants to conquer death.
We're all frightened of it." In the seventh and final
Harry Potter book, there will be deaths of both goodies and
baddies. She was talking to her husband, Neil, recently,
after she had just written the death of one particular character.
"He shuddered. 'Oh don't do that,' he said to
me, but of course I did." | 
