Live on Stage: J.K. Rowling
©Scholastic
"It was more like a rock concert than a book reading," said one enthusiastic fan, and indeed, if someone had stumbled into Radio City Music Hall on Tuesday or Wednesday night and heard the high-pitched screams from the audience, it would have been easy to assume that the latest teen sensation was appearing on stage. Which, in fact, was the case. J.K. Rowling, in her first visit to the U.S. in six years, took part in a benefit reading along with Stephen King and John Irving, billed as "An Evening with Harry, Carrie and Garp." Proceeds from the two sold-out shows went to Doctors Without Borders and the Haven Foundation.
Rowling read last, after King and Irving (who had their own legions of screaming fans). When she took the stage to a standing ovation, one audience member yelled out, "Don't kill Harry!" To which Rowling replied, as she took her seat, "No pressure there!" Seated on an oversize throne, she read a passage from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and then fielded pre-selected questions.
A few of her answers yielded new information. In reply to a question from surprise guest Salman Rushdie and his nine-year-old son that involved an elaborate theory about how Professor Dumbledore comes back to life in
Book 7, Rowling said, "I feel I have to be explicit. Dumbledore is definitely dead. You shouldn't expect Dumbledore to pull a Gandalf." A cry immediately erupted from the crowd, to which she commented, "All of you definitely need to move through the five stages of grief and get past his death." She added that she'd heard about a Web site, dumbledoreisnotdead.com, which is devoted to conjecture similar to Rushdie's theory, and said, "I imagine they aren't happy right now." (Of course, over at dumbledoreisnotdead.com, a post later that evening speculated that her statement was likely a red herring.)
Rowling also told the audience that people often think she has planned out the Harry Potter storylines much more than she actually has. For instance, she said, "This afternoon in the shower I believe I changed the title of Book 7," after thinking she'd definitely decided what it would be.
A clear high point of the evening for Rowling was when an audience member asked King which literary characters scare him, and in his answer he said, "Frankly, I was surprised by how scary [Rowling's] Death Eaters were," to which Rowling replied with pride, "I scared Stephen King!"
Addressing the question of what the future holds for her, post-Harry, Rowling said that she had a book for slightly younger children that was half finished, and that she would "probably go back to that. But I think I'll need a little mourning time." To which the questioner replied, "So will we."-Diane Roback