J.K. Rowling

  b. 1965 | English author

At The Bottom

— 1993

Penniless and wracked with depression...

Penniless and wracked with depression, a young, aspiring English writer and single mother named Joanne Rowling toyed with the idea of taking her own life.  Although this would deprive her infant daughter of the only parent she’d truly known, Rowling wondered if her baby wouldn’t have a better chance in life with someone else — someone who could pay the rent, someone who could keep a marriage together, someone who could offer the emotional and financial stability that Rowling believed herself incapable of providing on her own.  Recently separated from her husband, Rowling had left Portugal (where they’d met and married) and returned to Britain in December 1993, taking up residence in a flat near her sister in Edinburgh, Scotland.  The change of scenery did her little good.  Even writing failed to provide relief, as she found herself unable to work on the novel — a fantasy tale about a boy wizard named Harry Potter — that she’d begun writing three years earlier.