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Book 1 - Sorcerer's Stone:
Dedication Page
"For Jessica, who loves stories,
For Anne, who loved them too;
And for Di, who heard this one first."
Jessica is JK Rowling's oldest daughter. She was born on July 27, 1993 and therefore was around during the feverish writing years of Sorcerer's Stone. JK Rowling writes on her official site, "Whenever Jessica fell asleep in her pushchair I would dash to the nearest cafe and write like mad. I wrote nearly every evening." In 1996, Jo received a telephone call from her agent Christopher Little saying that Bloomsbury agreed to publish the book. She writes, "After I had hung up, I screamed and jumped into the air; Jessica, who was sitting in her high-chair enjoying tea, looked thoroughly scared."
During the writing years, Jo says, "There were times when Jessica ate and I didn't. I feel like it's a case of 'cue the Hovis music' when I say that, but it's true, however it sounds. When I fetched up in Edinburgh I was pretty much penniless and it was a complete shock to my system." She commonly wrote in Nicolson's cafe while Jessica was asleep. "I would go to Nicolson's cafe, because the staff were so nice and so patient there and allowed me to order one espresso and sit there for hours, writing until Jessica woke up. You can get a hell of a lot of writing done in two hours if you know that's the only chance you are going to get."
Nicolson's cafe general manager Roland Thomson said, "We all know Joanne and Jessica. They would come in almost every day, and the wee girl would sleep while her mother wrote. It was really sweet."
Jessica was named after Jessica Mitford because Mitford "followed [JK Rowling's] principles." She was christened at a Church of Scotland in Edinburgh in the 1990s.
Anne was Jo's mother. She met Jo's father, Peter, "on a train travelling from King's Cross station to Arbroath in Scotland when they were both eighteen," married the next year, and had Jo another year later.
Anne was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis when Jo was a teenager. Jo said, "The worst thing that happened during my teenage years was my mother becoming ill. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, which is a disease of the central nervous system, when I was fifteen. Although most people with multiple sclerosis experience periods of remission - when their illness stops progressing for a while, or even improves - Mum was unlucky; from the time of her diagnosis onwards she seemed to become slowly but steadily worse. I think most people believe, deep down, that their mothers are indestructible; it was a terrible shock to hear that she had an incurable illness, but even then, I did not fully realise what the diagnosis might mean."
Anne died at the age of 45. Jo said, "It was a terrible time. My father, Di and I were devastated; she was only forty five years old and we had never imagined - probably because we could not bear to contemplate the idea - that she could die so young. I remember feeling as though there was a paving slab pressing down upon my chest, a literal pain in my heart."
In another interview, she said, "For mom there would have been a particular glory in being a writer, because she was the real booklover. And so it does add a little bit of poison to the knife, if you like, that the one thing that I think she really would have prized, she never knew."
Her mother's passing greatly affected not only Jo as a person, but also her writing. She said, "Mum died six months after I'd written my first attempt at an opening chapter. And that made an enormous difference, because I was living it. I was living what I had just written....The Mirror of Erised is absolutely entirely drawn from my own experience of losing a parent. Five more minutes, just, please, God, give me five more minutes. It'll never be enough."
Di is Jo's younger sister, born a year and eleven months after Jo. Jo writes on her official site, "The small amount of time that we didn't spend fighting, Di and I were best friends. I told her a lot of stories and sometimes didn't even have to sit on her to make her stay and listen. Often the stories became games in which we both played regular characters. I was extremely bossy when I stage-managed these long-running plays but Di put up with it because I usually gave her star parts."
When Jo left Portugal in 1994, she moved to Edinburgh to stay with Di for several weeks until she was more financially stable. The city captivated Jo, causing her to stay even after she had a steady income. When asked about Di in a 1998 interview with The Scotsman, Jo said, "She was the first person to read the books. She's much better read than I am, so it meant a lot to me that she liked it."
Di is now a lawyer and is living in Edinburgh.
Back to Book 1
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