I Reread Harry Potter as an Adult and Cried at Hedwig

A cupboard, a letter, and the most efficient inciting incident in children’s fiction

Here’s the thing about the setup of Harry Potter: it is almost insultingly simple and it works every single time. Orphan boy, cruel relatives, cupboard under the stairs, letter that won’t stop arriving no matter how hard his uncle burns the mail. Rowling doesn’t waste a page getting Harry out of Privet Drive and onto Platform Nine and Three Quarters, and honestly the books are never quite that efficient again, but that first hundred pages of book one is a masterclass in giving a lonely kid reader exactly what they want: the discovery that you were never ordinary, you were just misplaced.

Then it’s Hogwarts, and the castle does what the castle does. Moving staircases, a troll in the girls’ bathroom, a three headed dog named after a myth most eleven year olds haven’t read yet. I won’t spoil what’s actually guarding the thing under the trapdoor, but I’ll say the mystery structure of book one, basically a locked room puzzle dressed up as a children’s book, holds up better than people give it credit for. Each book after that follows roughly the same shape: a school year, a mystery, a Voldemort shaped problem at the end. It’s formula. It’s also comfort food, and there’s no shame in that.

What actually holds up, and what really doesn’t

Let me be straight with you: books one and two are thin. Charming, but thin. The real spine of this series is three, four, and five. The Prisoner of Azkaban is the best written book in the bunch, tightest plot, a genuinely devastating reveal about Harry’s parents, and the werewolf stuff still gets me even though I’ve read it probably six times. Goblet of Fire is where the series stops being cute and starts being scary, and the graveyard scene at the end is one of the only times in the whole series I felt actual dread, not spooky-fun dread, real dread.

And then Order of the Phoenix. Look, I need to be honest about this one because I think a lot of people pretend it’s fine and it is not fine, it’s 870 pages of a fifteen year old boy screaming at everyone who loves him, and while I understand that’s the point (he’s traumatized, he’s gaslit by the Ministry, nobody believes him about Voldemort), it’s still a slog in the middle third. Umbridge is one of the great villains in children’s literature, genuinely more upsetting than Voldemort because she’s bureaucratic cruelty wearing a pink cardigan, but I forgot how much filler surrounds her.

Here’s my heretical tangent: I think the books get worse as they get longer, not better. Rowling clearly got more freedom and less editing as the series became a phenomenon, and you can feel it. Half-Blood Prince meanders. Deathly Hallows spends a hundred pages camping in a tent, arguing, which is thematically appropriate for wartime despair and also kind of a drag to read.

But then it lands. The Deathly Hallows finale, the walk through the forest, the reveal of what Snape actually was this whole time: I’ve reread that chapter more than any other piece of writing I own. Alan Rickman ruined me for casting directors forever because now I can’t read Snape without hearing him, and honestly that’s fine.

I have to say the quiet part too. It’s impossible now to talk about this series without talking about its author, and I’m not going to pretend that’s a footnote. Rowling’s public statements about trans people in the years since have made a lot of readers, including people I love, feel genuinely unwelcome in a world that was supposed to be about the outcasts finding home. I don’t think that erases what these books did for me at nine years old. I also don’t think loving the books means you owe the author your silence. Both things are true and they sit uncomfortably next to each other every time I pick these up now.

It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.

About J.K. Rowling

Joanne Rowling wrote the first book on napkins and scraps of paper on trains between Manchester and London while broke, recently divorced, and raising a baby on her own, which is the kind of origin story that sounds made up because it basically reads like the plot of a inspirational movie nobody would greenlight. She got rejected by a dozen publishers before Bloomsbury took a chance, reportedly on the strength of an eight year old editor’s daughter demanding the next chapter. She became one of the most read authors alive. She has also, in the years since, become one of the most publicly polarizing, and I think you can hold the phenomenon and the person as two separate, uncomfortable facts.

If Hogwarts wrecked you, read these next

• The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis, for the same wardrobe-shaped ache of wanting a door into somewhere else
• The Magicians by Lev Grossman, for what happens when you grow up and magic school doesn’t fix you
• A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin, for a magic school story with actual consequences and none of the whimsy
• Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo, if you want the heist energy and the ensemble cast without the baggage

You can find the whole set, all seven, here on Amazon if you want to do the deranged thing I did and read them back to back as an adult.

For your book club

1. Does the series hold up better in the early, shorter books or the later, longer ones, and what does that tell you about editing versus freedom?
2. Is Snape a redemption arc or does the books let him off too easy for how he treated Harry for years?
3. How do you separate, or do you separate, the author’s public views from your feelings about the books themselves?
4. Umbridge versus Voldemort: which villain actually scared you more and why?
5. If you read these as a kid, does rereading as an adult change what the story is actually about?