Artist: Mary GrandPré
I don’t remember how old I was when I read the first Harry Potter book. More accurately, I don’t remember how old I was when the first Harry Potter book was read to me, as I’m pretty sure it was my dad who read me the story for the first time. All I know is that however old I was, I was younger than Harry Potter was when his story began, and I was completely and utterly hooked.
The rest of the books are sort of a blur to me— I have no idea when I read them all for the first time. I’m fairly sure I got permission to read Half-Blood Prince in the 4th grade, to keep me occupied on our drive down to Florida to visit my grandparents. So I was in the vicinity of 10 or 11 when I finished the series, and I was probably 6 or 7 when I began it.
The reason I’m so fascinated with how old I was when I first read the Harry Potter series is because I have such a distinct memory of rereading the books when I was fifteen. This was not my first reread, or even my second, or fifth, or even, tenth. No, by this time in my life I had read the entirety of the Harry Potter series no less than 27 times. My obsession had been particularly focused on Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, since my cousins had left their audiobook at our grandparents house by accident one summer, and I had “rescued” it. I would listen to it constantly, sometimes even putting it on as background noise while I read a different Harry Potter book. But reading it at fifteen, after taking a short but decided break from the franchise in my freshman year of high school, I suddenly realized that Harry was my age. And that was in some ways the beginning of my love for the series, and the end of it. Fifteen was the first time I read the books and it really clicked for me that Harry was a teenager, a kid, the same as me; except now I was in the precarious position of a fifteen year old who is both a child and not a child anymore, and it suddenly dawned on me that everything that happened to Harry in these books were both terrifying, and deeply, unsettlingly tragic.
Niel Gaiman wrote a fascinating blog post about the same sort of thing I experienced with Harry Potter, only he was talking about his children’s book, Coraline. In it, he describes the phenomenon in which children view the book as an exciting adventure, whereas adults view it as nothing less than abject horror. The difference lies in the perception of Coraline— kids view her as a peer, an equal, who’s having a magical adventure, whereas adults view Coraline as a child who needs to be protected. It’s been very strange for me to go through both stages of this phenomenon with Harry, and even stranger to remember so distinctly how I felt reading the stories as a child with the lens I now have as an adult. It’s not even that I think Harry is fragile, per say, or that he needs protecting. It’s just that I see his story as much more tragic than I think even the book is ever willing to admit. And as a kid, I read the stories on a very surface level. Hogwarts was a magical place, and Harry was it’s champion. But as an adult (or close to one, anyways) all I can see is the tragedy that lies in every corner. Every element of the story that I thought too hard about suddenly unraveled, leading me back to the unshakable sadness that permeates every aspect of the story.
There are the obvious tragedies— Harry’s parents' deaths, for example. But even Lily and James’ murders are more horrific than they appear on the surface, once you dig a little deeper, think a little harder. For example, because of the casting in the movies aged them up around ten years (something I discuss in my video about the difficulties of adapting YA books to film) what most people don’t realize is that Lily and James were only 21 when they died. As I creep ever-closer to that age I can’t stop thinking about how young they were. And it only gets worse from there, because if Lily and James were only 21, then the rest of their friends were no older than 40 when they died. Sirius Black was 37. Remus Lupin was 39. Suddenly, with just a small amount of investigation, what was already a sad collection of situations becomes doubly so, in an odd, retrospective sort of way. And almost every element of the book is like this. The amount of death and just overall tragedy in the Potter series is frankly kind of astounding. Every re-read of the first six books is forever tarnished by intrusive thoughts going, Fred Weasley only has 6 more years to live. He’s 13. Or else, Neville lacks confidence because he’s constantly being compared to his enshrined, insane parents, who would have loved and supported him in ways his grandmother was not emotionally capable of. Or even, Harry only really has about 20 on-page conversations with Sirius, and this is one of the last ones.
The brilliant thing about the series, and the thing that makes it so much more tragic as an adult, is that this sadness is hardly ever explored in obvious ways. Harry isn’t constantly thinking about how much he wishes his parents were alive— this creeps up on us in different ways. One of the principly saddest scenes in the story does this remarkably well. The tragedy is introduced to us in a magical way, one that’s interesting on its own accord besides all the sad stuff, one that’s interesting to kids in an abstract sense. I’m talking of course, about the Mirror of Erised. Harry finds this mirror stuffed away in a random classroom late at night, and finds that it shows him images of his parents, and the rest of his family that he never got to know. From the book:
“The Potters smiled and waved at Harry and he stared hungrily back at them, his hands pressed flat against the glass as though he was hoping to fall right through it and reach them. He had a
powerful kind of ache inside him, half joy, half terrible sadness.”
Harry returns to the mirror every night, just to get a glimpse at his family, until finally Dumbledore confronts him there, and tells him the mirror is going to be moved, and also doles out a little bit of sage advice: “It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live, remember that.”
The interesting thing reading this as a child vs reading this as an adult is that as a kid with both parents fully present in my life, I don’t think I had the emotional intelligence necessary to gain the full impact of this scene. It was a cool mirror that showed what you wanted! And, yeah, Harry wants to see his parents, that made sense. That yearning feeling they describe was altogether unfamiliar to me, but you get the gist without it. But as an adult… whoooo boy. I cry every time I read the passage I put above. I’m crying writing this right now! Because is there really anything sadder than a little, lonely 11 year old boy longing for his parents and his family that were cruelly ripped away from him at so young an age he doesn’t even remember them? Frankly, I can’t think of much that competes with that. And when I’m reading the story, or even just engaging with the world in any way, it’s difficult for me to see it without this lens of immovable sadness.
The thing is, Harry takes Dumbledore’s advice to not “dwell on dreams” for the most part. He doesn’t constantly harp on how much he wished he had his parents, and these thoughts even embarrass him the times they do come up. But it’s the little things, like when Molly Weasley gives him a hug in Goblet, and Harry thinks, “he had no memory of ever being hugged like this, as though by a mother.” Or in Deathly Hallows, when Harry suggests the resurrection stone would be the most useful item, because he would get to see his parents, and ask for their help. Thinking about these moments with the full context of Harry’s tragedy behind him makes it feel like a physical punch to the gut. Harry as a character is so guarded in his emotions in some ways, it takes a bit more emotional maturity than a 4th grader typically has to really peel back that protective layer and immerse yourself in the sadness that Harry carries around with him all the time. It also takes a bit of an obsession and a bit of willingness to engage with the text this strongly.
There was a lot that went into this perfect storm of self-imposed tragedy. For one, I, and every generation behind me, is in the unique position of reading Harry Potter for the first time as a child, but not growing up alongside him like the generation before mine did. This made it so that in my mind, Harry was much older than he actually was. When you’re 8, 16 seems very old. 16 is twice as many years as you’ve been alive. 16 feels adult. Thinking about Harry as the cool older capable hero made it a lot easier to stomach everything he was going through, and also made it that much more painful when I finally caught up to him in age, and had the rude awakening that 16 is really not that old at all. Secondly, I was obsessed with the series for so long. I could recite obscure factoids, spells, characters, and even passages from the books with relative ease. This meant that, like I said above, every reread I would be peppered with thoughts from every detail of the books, highlighting just how sad it was. Thirdly, being engaged with the world for so long makes it difficult for my brain to sort of separate the fact that this is fictional, and not real. This is also just a testament to JKR’s skill when it comes to making worlds and characters feel so alive. Like, I know intellectually that Harry is fictional, that his pain isn’t technically “real,” but boy is it hard to convince the empathetic side of my brain of that.
The thing is, I don’t think looking at the series in these terms is necessarily a bad thing. I mean, the way I sometimes get obsessive over it and feel real genuine bouts of overwhelming sadness about it is bad, and when that happens I know it’s time to disengage. But in moderation, sadness isn’t bad. It just reminds us that there was something there worth valuing, worth savoring, worth appreciating, and now it’s gone. It reminds us that those things do exist, even if this particular thing doesn’t anymore. Thinking about Harry’s parents deaths makes me more appreciative of my own very much alive parents, in a weird kind of way. And the way Harry overcomes his own sadness and tragedy and builds a life for himself that is good and happy and full of love and light is frankly inspiring, especially since we see how much he struggled to get there. And it’s not as if I don’t find joy in this series at all anymore- I do! I still love the magic of losing myself in this world. It just feels a little bit more real to me now, a little more like real life. Finding sadness in Harry Potter made me appreciate the series in a completely different, but beautiful way. It feels more full. And if I could go back to the way I saw it before, I don’t think I would. I just have to remember to take Dumbledore’s advice sometimes.
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