She swears at the rate of about once every five minutes. She
wears amazingly high heels. She’s a pleasure to watch.
She and Patchett, sitting facing each other with a huge
Casual Vacancy book cover behind them, went right into the
technical stuff about the novel’s composition. “The
challenge was the structure of the book,” Rowling said. “I
had a complicated diagram — arrows going in all directions.
” (If you haven’t read the book, or the reviews, it’s a
kaleidoscopic sort of novel with lots of points of view and
many moving parts.) She works on a MacBook Air (“the MacBook
Air changed my life. I can now work really anywhere.”) She
had to cut out a lot of things she loved, including an
autopsy scene, but as she said several times, “we are
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It was a big change for Rowling, a real gut-check, to write a
book that was this adult, with drugs and death and sex and
even rape. “The first couple of people who read it, the
immediate reaction was, ‘fucking hell!’ It’s so dark, it’
s just so dark,” she said. On the other hand, she pointed
out, the sex is not gratuitous — it’s not porn — which led
to the obligatory 50 Shades of Grey joke, which was in fact
the line of the night: “People have sex in this book, but
nobody really enjoys it. That’s the difference.”
Rowling didn’t stay focused strictly on The Casual Vacancy.
She and Patchett spent some minutes on the question of
children’s books and why they’re important. “Children are
very familiar with fear,” Rowling said. “And children’s
literature gives them a place to explore that.” (Rowling
also quoted, with a horrified shudder, an ‘expert’ she saw
on TV: “‘Children must be protected from their
imaginations.’”) They touched on Patchett’s second career
as a bookseller (Patchett’s first career is as a bestselling
novelist in her own right — Bel Canto, last year’s State of
Wonder, etc.) Apparently backstage Rowling had been talking
about how wonderful it must be to run a bookstore. “The
minute you left the room,” Rowling says, “my husband said,
‘Do not open a bookshop! We haven’t got enough going on?’
”
(Personally I think she should open a bookstore. Rowling’s
husband, a doctor, was sitting in the front row, and they
stopped at a couple of points for a little banter, but you
couldn’t see him, or hear him, from Row S in the orchestra.)
(MORE: J.K. Rowling: More Harry Potter Possible)
