I had a bad few years. A lot of us did—there was something about a Trump presidency that seemed to shake things loose in the worst way. The planet is dying, our governments are a disaster, late-stage capitalism is a huge bummer, and Drag Race devolved into the All-Stars 4 season, which we can agree was basically the nadir of recent human history. In 2017, my personal life was a bit of a wreck, too, what with the evictions and the rocky marriage and the living in a former laundry room and whatnot. All of this to say: things were dark, friends. Things were real dark.
I hadn't read a lot since I graduated from the University of Toronto in 2010. I mean, I had been reading—the news, the New Yorker, Twitter, Facebook, Harper's, the Patagonia catalog, and the expressions on my friend's faces when we talked about the future—but I hadn't dived into a serious B-O-O-K in...a while. I didn't really want to. For the first five years, I was burned out on literature. I had read so much for so long that I was bored by the very act of reading. After 2016, I was stuck in the infinite loop of parenting a baby and trying to catch snatches of information and stories in and around the moments the baby was asleep. I didn't have time or energy, but I did have a lot of respect for my friend Liz, who was constantly plowing through giant novels in a very low-key, NBD sort of way.
One of the piles of novels Liz went through was the Harry Potter series. I scoffed a bit, internally (and maybe to her face?): aren't those, you know, children's books? To me, Harry Potter was something my sister was into when I was in high school, back when I was busy with Very Important Things like wearing a corset, listening to the Beastie Boys, half-assing an interest in Buddhism, and staring creepily at my crushes from across the room. Those books were for little kids who were into, like, magic and brooms and other things because I hadn't read the books all the way through.
But Liz was like, "Yeah! And they were great!"And as much as I scoff, I respect her opinion deeply, so I decided to follow her lead.
I checked the first one out from the library and it was as I remembered it: a little juvenile, sort of boring for non-eleven year olds, and awful in parts (The Dursleys! What the actual F!). But it was also...sort of magical. As it should be, because it's literally about magic, but the process of discovering Harry's world was delightful. Diagon Alley, the wizarding world's Mall of America, is a place I'd like to go: so many bang-pop tricks and old-timey curios! The use of quills and parchment and owls, rather than computers and emails, feels like a respite from my inbox. And Hogwarts, the wizarding school Harry attends, is the ultimate academic milieu. If you're of a certain disposition, going to boarding school to make friends and get away from younger siblings is the actual dream.
I pressed on. The second book is...not great. But by third, though, things pick up. Characters from outside Harry's common room start to appear: friends of his parents, for instance, both good and bad. The fourth book introduced a much wider world, with two new wizarding schools, a whole governing body, and international sports! And on it goes, with the fifth, sixth, and seventh books expanding and contracting around Harry as his world grows and shrinks during his quest to avenge his parents, defeat The Dark Lord, and repress his homosocial love for Ron Weasley.
I won't rehash the whole plot; there are wikis and podcasts for that. But thematically, we can look big: good and evil, what it means to be a leader, bravery, the importance of friendship when we feel like an outcast, and how to grow up, especially when it's hard or you don't really have the tools.
In addition to the Harry Potter books, a friend hipped me to the most marvelous podcast, Witch, Please, a feminist discussion of Harry, the books, and the concerns of the wizarding world. The two hosts, Marcelle and Hannah, are two self-described "lady scholars" who are 1) very, very funny; 2) clearly good friends with each other, and 3) learned on history, literature, feminism, queer theory, film, social justice, and about three dozen other things that make their readings of the HP universe so much more textured and deeply considered. I listened to all the episodes—I love a good podcast while I knit!—and by the end, it was like spending time with two very smart, funny, feminist friends who only wanted to talk about Harry Potter. A nerd's utopia! A woman's dream! Ravenclaws, unite and put in your headphones!
(Sidebar: there is an episode of Witch, Please wherein Marcelle gives pointers to would-be podcasters, and she says that she never edits out the sound of her and Hannah laughing because "women's laughter is political," and that sentence shot through my heart like a rocket and gave me another dimension to understanding how and why seeking out pleasure and joy is an act of courage and self-love, and I would be remiss if I didn't mention that. They are wise, those women.)
Hannah and Marcelle's deep readings of the books gave me permission to really engage with them, to think broadly and deeply about models of family and of masculinity, of illness and heroism, of racism and colonialism. For a series of "books for children," there are lots of examples of all of the above, and more, and studying the books like you might study any other canonical 20th century text (ahem, Philip Roth) gave me a lovely sense of unity with the series. Critiquing a book is one way of loving it; it's saying to the text, "Let me take you very seriously, indeed."
What a relief it has been, then, to immerse myself in this world. Self-care, as the internet meme goes, is creating a life that you don't need to escape from, but sometimes, in trauma work, even your shrink will be like, "Imagine a cabin in the woods. You're alone. There's a soft animal. Pet it," so your brain can stop fritzing out for, like, one half-second and you can take a breath. Hogwarts, for me, became that breath. Witch, Please became that breath. Knitting was too. All three together became a refuge, an narrative-audio-tactile escape hatch where heavy things like Trump and Doug Ford and Brexit and climate change and birth trauma and sad relationships and loneliness were replaced by a a castle, a fictional fascism, and friends who rose up and fought back.
When I say Harry Potter saved me, what I mean is: for a long while, the inside of my head was a terrible place to be. I had spent so long immersed in trauma and graduate-level Life Shit that all my fuses had been burned out and I was a sad lump of a human being. I didn't like my life very much. In order to keep living it, I needed meaningful, loving, lovely distraction. People shit on distraction because we're all supposed to be doing the Very Hard Work of healing the world and ourselves, and I agree, but jesus, even the government mandates one half-hour and two fifteens. Rest is important. Pleasure is important. Choosing fun, and seeking it out, can be an act of resistance. Chasing that feeling can be salvation. I like to knit and listen to Harry Potter audiobooks and podcasts about Harry Potter and at the end of the day, I feel good. Just that, in the aftermath of a bad few years, can feel like a huge gain.
Harry Potter isn't a gentle world: people die, people leave and do not return, friendships creak and strain, romances fizzle, politics suck, parents are fallible and abuse is real. But somehow, combine it all with a wand and a hippogriff and a castle full of cheerful ghosts, and it became a good time. It's a world that's both big enough to feel wonderous and small enough to feel manageable. In a dark time, that can be a balm. Add in the icing on the cake that is a thoughtful, hilarious, well-structured podcast, and it was something to look forward to. A reason. A communion.
I don't want to live in the Harry Potter universe, but god damn, visiting there has helped me rebuild my soul.
