It’s Never Quite Like You Remembered

This weekend, as a late birthday gift I decided to purchase the first four Harry Potter novels via ebook from the Pottermore shop. Sometime between my move to Seattle and back again I lost my entire Harry Potter collection and devastated though I was, I knew that it was time to move on. As much as I would like the print collection again, ebooks right now are just more sound for me.

As such, I decided to start reading them again, for the first time in eleven years. I can already hear the screams of ‘true’ Harry Potter fans: How could I, of all people, who claims to be so in love with J.K.Rowling and all she does, not have read the books since the very first time I read them all those years ago? 

I don’t really have a good answer for this. The truth is, not reading the books has allowed me to have a sort of idealized memory of what they were actually like, I remembered them as coming to me at a very important and often difficult time in my life and they’ve stayed in that context. Re-reading them again as an adult… I won’t say that I’m disappointed, I still love the books and I’m still as addicted as ever, but it isn’t the same. I didn’t realize how much of the story I had actually forgotten until I was reading the words on the page and thought… That seems new. I had completely forgotten how much the films had really changed (though it was always something I read other bloggers ranting about). I don’t think I fully realized how much her writing evolved over those ten years, as one’s writing does.

Writers evolve as we grow, our writing gets better and sometimes looking back it’s almost hard to believe that we actually wrote something like that. I’ve noticed that over the years, looking back on old work sometimes it’s pretty terrifying, and I’m proud of myself for how much I’ve accomplished and how far I’ve come as a writer. Don’t get me wrong, whatever spell Harry Potter managed to cast on me all those years ago is still alive and well, it is still one of the few books I have ever known that was able to enrapture me so completely and so quickly, and it will always remain the book that made me want to become a writer. No matter how different it feels now, or how much has changed in the eleven years since I first picked up the first Harry Potter and my life was changed forever.