The villagers of Little Hangleton still called it "the Riddle House," even though is had been many years since the Riddle family had lived there...
There’s something you should know about me. The things I hate the most have always become my favorites once I give them a chance.
But I was eight and had not yet discovered this fact about myself, so I went right on hating Harry Potter because the adults in my life told me to do so.
I had no idea that my grandfather bringing me to audition for a local independent film would change my life forever.
2001—I was about to enter the 4th grade, however, I was hired as the photo double for one of the child actors in this local film (which was only released in film festivals and never actually made it to the big time). I took it, and spent the first two months of 4th grade on a movie set rather than in a classroom.
It was weird. Wonderful and exciting and new, but weird. There were six kids, my sister and I being the doubles and the others being the cast. I didn’t realize it back then, but ten years later I see that the child actors were a bit conceited and did not treat my sister and me very well. They thought they were better than us.
Except for one of them.
Her name was Izzy, and I will never forget her. One hot day in August 2001 she and I were hanging out in her trailer (doubles didn’t get trailers, so I spent most of my time in hers), talking about random things, when I noticed a copy of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire sitting on the couch. I laughed and said something along the lines of, “You don’t actually read those, do you?” To which she looked a bit offended.
And then she dared me to read it.
She had to leave to film, and I was alone with the book. Now you have to understand I was a good little girl. I mean, I did everything my parents told me, I had perfect grades, I was the teacher’s pet in every class I had ever been in.
But Izzy had dared me.
So I picked it up.
Enter Frank Bryce and the story of the Riddle House. I had no idea what was going on. I was sure that these books would focus on some kid named Harry. What’s a Wormtail? Quidditch? Talking to snakes? Ministry of Magic? Muggle? Killing people with magic? What?
Needless to say, I was not hooked.
Izzy returned then, and I began to bombard her with questions. To which she laughed and replied, “I’ll bring you my copy of Sorcerer’s Stone tomorrow. That’s where it begins. You should start there.”
I spent every moment that I wasn’t filming or being tutored reading those books. Izzy’s dad was a vital source of information for me. He explained everything from the exact rules of Quidditch to the pronunciation of Hermione’s name. The Steele family was a godsend.
I didn’t know it then, but I think that I became so hooked on the first book because I really didn’t have any friends at that point in my life, other than Izzy, I mean. Harry became that brother that I had never really known I wanted. I loved Sorcerer’s Stone. I loved hating Snape and being forced to acknowledge he was helping Harry in the end. It was the first book that had ever challenged my opinion on a character, and I loved it. Hagrid made me feel safe and I trusted Dumbledore to be there in the end. Neville was sweet and Ron made me laugh and Hermione was me. It was wonderful.
I started Chamber of Secrets with high expectations and was not disappointed. The Dursleys were properly awful and I hated them for what they did to Harry, but I was beginning to fall in love with adversity. Up to this point in my life, I had never read much of anything with meaning. I had never taken lessons from books, but Harry Potter showed me the way in which people aren’t all good or all bad. Dobby had good intentions and horrid methods, Lockhart was shallow and cowardly and it actually made me smile a bit when Snape destroyed him in the dueling club. Lucius Malfoy was vile, and it shed light on Draco’s personality. I trusted Riddle (though in the back of my mind, echoes of that first chapter of Goblet made me wary), and then he turned out to be evil. And Harry was loyal and brave and it saved them in the end. He was becoming my hero.
Prisoner of Azkaban will always be my favorite (though Order of the Phoenix and Deathly Hallows are an extremely close second and third). Back then, I wasn’t so into trying to figure everything out before it happened, I just let the story take me where it wanted me to go, and that book was the better for it. Sirius, Remus, and Peter shocked me. At first I felt betrayed by Remus, whom I had grown to love, but then I realized that he would never betray Harry and Dumbledore. Sirius was this shining light of hope that things would get better for Harry, and Peter was the scum of the earth. But this book brought the Marauders into my life, and if you know me at all, you know that that era of Hogwarts holds a place of honor in my heart. I loved the depth of their story, and the possibilities that it held. I loved the tragedy and the way that they couldn’t always overcome it, but they were strong and they dealt with it regardless. Hermione was brilliant in that book, as always, but she went to such great lengths to save both Buckbeak and Sirius that I grew to admire her even more than I already did. She and Ron bickered the whole way through that book, and I loved that she was right in the end.
And then I was back in school and I borrowed/stole Goblet of Fire from the school library. I still have that copy and love it for all that its worth (about 75 cents, actually, as I discovered when I, uh, accidently dropped it into a puddle and had to pay the librarian). There was Frank Bryce and Voldemort and Wormtail and everything just waiting for me, and this time I understood it. The Riddle House will always be one of my favorite chapters. And then Harry became the fourth champion, and Ron was an idiot, and S.P.E.W was formed, and Winky, and Crouch, and Moody, and wow. It was an intense book, but Hermione was my favorite part.
I could probably write novels on Hermione Granger, but I will try to keep it short and sweet. As much as I love Sirius and Remus and Fred and George Luna and Draco and everyone, at the end of the day, Hermione has to be my favorite character. She has been ever since the troll in Sorcerer’s Stone. She’s annoying and bossy and doesn’t have many friends, but she’s also brave and she stands up for what she thinks is right no matter what. At first, I connected with her because I was the smartest person in my class and I was always a teacher’s pet, so most of the students in my elementary school didn’t like me. But then I got to know Hermione better and saw that she was so much more than a bookish know-it-all. She was a true friend and had a beautiful heart. I saw it in the trial with Buckbeak and her fierceness in helping Hagrid, and again when she went to such lengths to save Sirius. Then there was S.P.E.W., and she was mocked for it and people told her she was wrong, but she alone saw the real unjustness of the situation and she alone tried to remedy the problem. She fights for what is right, and she will always be the person that I strive most to be like. Because for all her flaws, she is possibly the most truly good person in the series, and I love her with all my heart.
I finished all four books in time for the movie release of Sorcerer’s Stone in November, but my mom still wasn’t keen on the idea of witchcraft. After much convincing, she brought me to the movie (not on the day it came out, unfortunately, but I got to go nonetheless). And from that moment on, she never said another ill word about Harry Potter. In fact, she has helped convince other parents about the goodness of the series. She always tells them, “It’s not about witchcraft or magic, not really. It’s about good vs. evil, and about the way that people should treat each other regardless of what they look like or think like or who they are. Magic is just a backdrop.”
I didn’t see Izzy again until summer 2003 (we lived in different counties, so we didn’t really keep in touch after the filming ended), when we met by chance at the mall call to my house. She and her mom had driven two hours to shop there (the mall is hardly anything special, which is why the coincidence is so great), and my mom, sister, and I had went for pretzels that afternoon.
Izzy and I talked for hours about what we thought would happen in the soon-to-be-released Order of the Phoenix, and to this day there is no person I liked to speculate with more. Even though everything we thought was completely wrong.
We went our separate ways again, and a few weeks later, I picked up Order of the Phoenix. It was the first book I ever bought on the day that it was released, and I fell in love. I adored the new angle with the Ministry being corrupt, and Umbridge is the single most detestable character I have ever (and will ever) read about. The Umbridge Vs. Snape bit, while comical, also really forced me to choose to side with Snape for the first time (Lockhart aside). It was strange, but Snape didn’t let me down. And Harry was losing it and Dumbledore was avoiding him and Harry was just so isolated. It was the book that I grew closest to him. I hated everyone that stood against him, and wanted nothing more than for things to finally work out. Then Sirius died, and I could just feel Harry’s world shattering and it broke my heart completely. But Dumbledore helped put it back together just a little at the end, when he gave Harry the truth for once. It didn’t fix the part of me that hurt for Sirius, but it did cause me to regain some faith in Dumbledore. And the Order being there at the end to look out for Harry showed me just how much these people really do care for him, even if they can’t always show it.
Two years later, Half-Blood Prince was released. I had since switched to a magnet school, and I felt like I fit in for the first time in my life, but Harry Potter was still something that I did on my own. I got the book the day it came out (it still has the little gold Reserved sticker to prove it), and absolutely devoured it. I wasn’t so consumed in the mystery of the Half-Blood Prince’s identity as I was the mystery of Draco and the relationships that evolved in this book. I felt like it opened up different sides of characters that we were never really able to see before. But Dumbledore died. And I hated Snape. I had always loathed him, of course, but I was beyond any comprehensible emotion when I first read it because no matter how much I had disliked him in the past, I had always expected him to be loyal to Dumbledore, and I felt betrayed. I kept expecting Dumbledore to return, alive and well, because he was Dumbledore, and I had grown up thinking of him as invincible. He simply couldn’t be dead. But he was.
During all of this, the second, third, and fourth movies had been released, and though I saw them day-of, the films had never really been a huge part of my Harry Potter experience.
Two years go by of re-reading and re-reading the six published novels. There was a lot of speculation and discussion and so so so many theories. But I made a decision during those two years that I will never forget.
Trust Snape.
To this day I don’t know how I did it, but I managed to figure out that Snape loved Lily, and that it was because of this that he had always protected Harry. Now, he had still killed Dumbledore, and normally a school crush would not have been enough to sway my opinion, but over the years, I learned a lot from Jo Rowling, one of the most important things being the power of love.
Snape loved Lily. And I let that be enough.
It was sort of earth-shattering (though that might be too strong a phrase), because I had hated him for six years, and I let one realization nix, not the hatred, but at least the distrust. I knew Snape would do right by Harry, and it was completely new to feel that way about the greasy man that lived in Hogwarts dungeon and tormented an eleven year old because he looked like his father.
So there I was. July 2007. The summer when questions would finally be answered, when everything would end. They said it would be a summer to remember.
It was July 10th and it was my first midnight release. Order of the Phoenix. I wish I could remember more about that night, but what stuck with me was the fact that my little sister and I (13 and 15, respectively), were breaking our town’s curfew by being at the movie without a parent. But the cops here get it, I think, because even though both of us were obviously under 18 when we walked out of that theater at three in the morning, not a single one of the many police officers asked us for ID, they just let us go with the crowd. I love the Harry Potter community.
Ten days later, my parents took my sister, my friend Christina, and myself to a Borders for the midnight release of Deathly Hallows. It was chaotic and crazy, but it was one of the best nights of my life. There was a trivia competition, costume judging, and about a hundred fans to speculate with one last time. It was magical.
I got the book and finished it in a day, and I was a mess. I cried the whole way through. It started when I read the dedication and did not stop until long after All was well. But I realized something as I read that book. I started off meticulously picking apart words and names and hints, trying to figure out what was going to happen in the end. It was so different from when I picked up Sorcerer’s Stone for the first time and just allowed myself to be swept away by the story. It was about the time of Dobby’s death that I realized my mistake. Who cares if I could figure out what Ravenclaw’s horcrux was or if I could predict who would live and die? It was a story that I started loving because it was magic, and trying to solve all the mysteries caused me to miss some of the truly magical things that the book had to offer. So I started reading from there on like I had when I was eight years old, and the book was so much better because of that. I don’t think I can accurately put my feelings toward the book into words, because it hurt so much to finish it. It was over, I thought.
But not really. There were still three movies and a theme park to go.
And there was fanfiction.
Two days after I finished Deathly Hallows, I posted the first chapter in a little story that I called Of Raindrops, Flowers, & Wishing Wells. It began on a whim to write something about the Marauder’s Era, and now it has become so much more. It has taught me almost everything I know about writing, and a lot about myself and my beliefs as well. Four years and 360,130 words later, I start college in August to do so.
The Half-Blood Prince movie was one of my favorite midnight premieres. My sister and I went again (still underage), and we had to squeeze in between two people that I still remember fondly.
The girl that sat next to me was short with long black hair and heavily made-up eyes. Right before the movie started, she looked at me and with complete secrecy and sincerity and whispered, “I heard that Dumbledore dies in this one.”
The guy sitting next to my sister was far more comical. He had obviously stumbled into the theater by mistake and just decided to join the party. He was half-drunk and proudly showed us pictures of the piles and piles of weed he had smoked while in Jamaica the previous week. He then fell asleep on my sister’s shoulder and remained there for the entire movie.
It was weird, and sort of uncomfortable, but it just goes to show the way Harry Potter can bring the most unlikely people together in strange ways. I don’t even know their names, but I’m not going to forget them any time soon.
The next time I saw Izzy was at a carnival. She told me that she was going to acting school, and she was already getting jobs. I told her that I was going to go to a state school to study English. In eight years, we had gone our separate ways, become our own people but we still remembered each other as the two little girls who had sat in a trailer on a hot summer day and talked about Harry Potter for the first time. We talked about all of our wrong predictions and how the real ending had been so much better, and I thanked her so much for the dare. I haven’t seen her since.
Then came Deathly Hallows Part 1. Myself and about fifteen others got together after school and all picked a character to dedicate a homemade t-shirt too, and we all wore them to the premiere that night. We got there five hours early and got the best seats in the house, but we spent those five hours trying to decipher the mystery that is Macbeth, because we had a test on it the following day. We all failed spectacularly.
Now it’s summer 2011, and my parents decided to take my sister and I to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. It was…amazing. It honestly felt like coming home. Everything was just how it should be and as soon as I walked in I knew that I would take my kids there someday. Everyone needs a piece of that magic.
Now here I am, sitting on my bed and looking around at the bedroom I have lived in since I was eight. There’s a Marauder’s Map banner on the wall that I got at the Deathly Hallows book release, a drawing a Ron that I made in preparation for my t-shirt, the entire collection of Harry Potter books (the Goblet of Fire I destroyed in 4th grade included), all of the extra books, as well as many theory books and guide books that I’ve collected over the years. There are notes scattered about for Of Raindrops, Flowers, & Wishing Wells, a birthday card my sister drew me with Harry on it, a Hufflepuff mug, a Gryffindor lanyard, and so many memories of curling up in this bed and cracking open one of the books for the first (or fifteenth) time.
It’s July 14, 2011, and it all ends tonight. I’ll be dressing up as Bellatrix and entering a costume contest, I’ll be winning a trivia competition (hopefully), and I’ll be seeing the movie at midnight with the rest of the world (or at least those in my time zone). This is the first and only time that I will be there legally.
But even though it is the end of a cinematic era, it’s not over. It’s not ever going to be over. Because J.K. Rowling inspired people. She inspired them to write and to draw and to live. She taught us lessons that we will take with us always and teach to our own children. That’s the real magic of it—it will live on long after our Queen Rowling is dead, and long after you and me, because, in the words of C. S. Lewis, “The imaginary things are a good deal more important than the real ones.”
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities."
