I open at the close: reflections on Harry Potter

July 19, 2011

Last week my library did a Harry Potter movie marathon to get our patrons ready for the final film. It gave me some time to reflect on the books, the movies, and the cultural phenomenon that is Harry Potter, which all culminated in me feeling very conflicted as I drove to the midnight showing of the final movie. I almost didn’t want to go, as if in some way not seeing the final movie would mean it wasn’t all over. But I did go (with one of our children’s librarians and her husband), and I laughed and cried a lot and then after we went our separate ways, I sat in my car waiting for the traffic to thin out and then drove home along completely empty roads feeling thoughtful and sad and full of feelings I don’t have words for.

I’m certainly not a superfan–I have made no costume, have attended no cons, have written no fanfic–but I can’t deny that Harry Potter has been a part of my life, first as just a reader and viewer and now as a librarian. So, inspired by the bloggers at the Hub as they bid farewell to Harry, here are musings on my personal journey with Harry Potter and a few thoughts on the impact the series has had.

My introduction to Harry came in the summer of 1999, the summer between middle school and high school. Growing up, I spent most of my summers at the lake cottage with my siblings and parents, and because I was a surly teen, a lot of my time that wasn’t taken up with involuntarily helping rebuild and improve parts of the cottage was devoted to complaining about being at the lake (oh the folly of my youth!) and holing up somewhere alone with a book. I tore through books like crazy and once I’d exhausted the supply I’d brought with me, I turned to the ancient, somehow simultaneously damp and crumbling paperbacks at my grandmother’s cottage two doors down. This is where I met so many books that would have been deemed totally inappropriate for me elsewhere.

But this summer, when my mom’s sister and her kids came to visit, they brought with them the first two Harry Potter books, which they declared to be really good and really popular at their school. After reading both of them in a day and a half, I shrugged to myself and thought that yes, they were pretty good, but not as amazing as they’d been billed to be. In retrospect, it seems peculiar to me that I even remember that decision with the clarity that I do.

It was somewhere around book 4 or 5 that I revised my opinion of the series. I’m not really sure what brought me back to Harry Potter when I’d initially dismissed him so quickly, but I suspect it was the growing attention the series was receiving. In 2000, the New York Times created a new bestseller list specifically for children’s literature because the Harry Potter books had been on the list for 79 straight weeks. Just before that new list was created, the first three Harry Potter books topped the combined list and a full third of the list were children’s books. [Wikipedia] It was also around this time that midnight releases for the books started happening.

Another peculiar thing: my age is part of what makes Harry Potter so significant to me, but it’s also what makes it difficult for me to fully grasp the impact it had on the world. I was young enough at the time that I don’t really have a lot of context for those midnight releases: I’m under the impression that books didn’t really get that kind of attention before, but I hadn’t really been paying attention until then. I also don’t have a sense for the kind of national media attention the books were getting because I wasn’t aware of national media attention for anything.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was published the summer after I graduated from high school, and by this point, I cared about the books. I don’t think it’s coincidental that this is when the stories start to open up beyond the happenings at Hogwarts and become more concerned with what is going on in the wider wizarding world. The Harry Potter books were among the (admittedly too many) books I took with me to college.

I’d also seen the first two movies in theaters when they came out: my mom’s entire side of the family would come stay with us for Thanksgiving, and on the day after, fifteen to twenty of us would see a movie together. As we’ve gotten older, we’ve started attending PG-13 movies, but when we were, collectively, younger, we’d attend G or PG films, so the first two were game, and certainly the clear winner against whatever else theaters were offering at the time.

College was a time when I finally met people who were like me and finally developed friendships that were close and that have lasted. The summer after my freshman year, we all returned to our separate hometowns, leaving me feeling lonely and isolated and wishing I’d stayed in contact with people I knew in high school. It was such a joy, then, when one of my best friends drove two hours from his parents’ place to mine to hang out and to go see Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban with me in theaters. For me, that movie will always be associated with my feelings at the time of finally seeing that friend again and, as a result, of finally feeling back in touch with the person I was becoming at college but felt like I was losing being back at my parents’ house.

The next summer I spent on-campus with my friends. None of us were big enough fans to dress up and attend a midnight release at a bookstore, but we did want to get our hands on the sixth book as soon as possible. Casey (my then-boyfriend and now husband) had, in high school, discovered that Meijer, the 24-hour Midwestern Walmart-like superstore, made the books available sometimes even before midnight, so a bunch of us drove to Meijer together and were pleased to be able to casually stroll in, pick up Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and purchase them while everyone else was still waiting in line at the Barnes & Noble down the road. And then–of course–I skipped work to read the book, especially since the one Big Huge Spoiler had appeared online ahead of publication, and as much as I tried to protect myself, I’d seen it, and had to know how it happened. (Am I really protecting the biggest spoiler in the series in this post? I guess I am.)

I spent the following fall studying abroad in Sweden. I didn’t want to miss seeing the fourth movie in theaters–these are movies you must see in the theater if you have the chance!–so I harassed everyone in the circle of friends I’d made until they agreed to go with me. We were initially concerned that the movie would be dubbed in Swedish with English subtitles (in Sweden, most foreign films just get Swedish subtitles, but children’s movies are dubbed), but this one was left in English. Afterward we all went out for drinks, and I absolutely loved being able to discuss the movie that is about cultural exchange in the wizarding world with my friends who were from Germany, Latvia, France, and England. Being able to compare our impressions of how one culture appears to another both fictionally and in real life was awesome.

And then, with no new Harry Potter content in 2006, we jump to the release of the fifth movie in the summer of 2007. I’d just graduated from college and was working on campus for the last summer. Almost everyone else had left town, but by this point, Harry Potter had become a community experience for me. The movies and books were something you anticipated, experienced, and discussed with others. I had one friend left in town, so he and some of his friends whom I didn’t know well and I went to the midnight showing of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. At this point, I’d stopped re-reading the books before seeing the movies because I knew that there would be things omitted, things told differently, and I didn’t want to have the richness of the story in the books too fresh in my mind for the movies. I think this is when I started to actually think about how movies and books tell stories differently, about what their relative merits are–and it was the Harry Potter series that sparked those thoughts.

Shortly afterward, the seventh book was released. I had ordered my copy from Amazon months ahead of time because I wasn’t sure where I’d be living at the time and I wanted to make sure I got a copy. It arrived–in its custom box, delivered by a guy who had been doing nothing but delivering Harry Potter books all day–at 2:30 in the afternoon. I had just a few weeks ago gotten a puppy and she was cute and tiny and time-consuming. For the first few hours of owning that book, I tried to balance reading and caring for her, but it was with relief that I finally put her to bed for the night and then sat down in the middle of my half-packed apartment to read. I read and I read and I read until I finished at 4AM. The final book made me cry even more than the end of the sixth book. I really hated the epilogue. And those were things I was able to discuss with friends the next day, friends with whom I’d never discussed a book before and never have since because our tastes are different or because that friend “doesn’t read.” But what I think is really special about this book is that all around the world, people were experiencing the same thing. The seventh book sold 11 million copies in the first 24 hours of it being on sale. That’s crazy.

And then again there was another year and a half without new Harry Potter. In that time, I moved to Canada to do a PhD program in math, realized I was going to be miserable for the rest of my life if I continued in that career path, dropped out of school and moved back in with my parents, moved back out again, and completed my first year of library school. The sixth movie came out while I was doing a summer internship at a public library, covering for the teen services librarian’s maternity leave. It was my first hands-on experience in a library and since the only other YA specialist was gone, I occasionally felt on my own and out of my depth, but through that, I learned a lot.

This is when I started thinking about Harry Potter as a librarian. The first time a kid came in with her mom and asked for a book, saying she liked Harry Potter, I scrambled and came up with a few other books about kids who do magic. It wasn’t until after she left, after I’d fielded the same question a few more times, that I started to realize that different people find different things in the Harry Potter series. For some patrons, they do want more books about magic, about an undiscovered world that lies parallel to our own, unseen by most. But for others, it was being able to get lost in a world that had a strong sense of its own history and internal logic. For others, it was the epic story of good versus evil, of fighting on in the face of what seems like certain failure. And for others still, they just wanted to be reading what their friends were reading. It wouldn’t be until the next semester that I took a readers’ advisory class and started to learn the language of appeal, but it was that summer that I developed a deeper sense for what readers look for in books. It was Harry Potter that taught me.

By November of 2010 when the seventh movie came out, I’d finished my MLS, moved from Indiana to Connecticut, and had been in my first professional position for two months. When we’d graduated college, Casey had moved to Connecticut; for the first two years, we saw each other every two or three months, and then for the last year, he was working out of his company’s Chicago office while I was doing my MLS in Indianapolis, and he’d drive down to see me every weekend. But after I finished my degree, we moved to Connecticut together, so we saw this movie together. We both agreed that it was driving us nuts to have to wait an additional eight months to see the cinematic version of how it all ends, but that there was just too much story to tell in one movie. I like that they chose actors who were young enough in the first film–and then did all of the films quickly enough–that the kids all still look like they’re almost the right age. They’re a bit older, to be sure, but we’ve seen them grow up as the characters have grown up, and that’s reinforced how this story takes place over years and years, and that it happens to kids.

And then a few days ago, the eighth and final movie came out. I was able to see how demand for our Harry Potter materials increased in anticipation of the movie. I was able to plan a Harry Potter movie marathon to cash in on the franchise’s popularity one last time (or for the first time, I guess–I arrived at librarianship too late to really be able to harness the power of Harry Potter for library goodness). I was able to think about Harry Potter as a librarian, but again, I’m limited by my relative youth and my relative newness to the profession to really personally understand the impact that the books and movies have had on our culture and on kids.

I was thirteen when the first Harry Potter book was released in the US–not so far from Harry’s eleven at the start of the book–and was twenty-two when Harry’s adventures concluded in print. I’m now twenty-six and the last movie is out and I have literally spent half of my life growing up with Harry Potter. The kids who are just now graduating from our children’s room to become my patrons have never known a life without Harry Potter. Kids younger than that will have no memories of book release parties, of midnight showings. Harry Potter will just be part of the literary canon for them, part of their culture growing up.

I think we’re beyond the question of whether or not the Harry Potter series is going to stand the test of time. What remains to be seen are the long-term effects its popularity has on youth literature, on movies, and on our culture as a whole. Can we point to the success of Harry Potter as the reason so many children’s and YA titles are getting optioned for movies? Can we point to the number of adults who got wrapped up in Harry Potter as what’s making adults read YA lit in increasing numbers? Can we point to the way readers ravenously devoured the series as explanation for statistics showing an increasing number of lifelong readers or improved literacy in both kids and adults (do those figures exist?)? Another thirteen years from now, what else will we attribute to the success of Harry Potter?

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Tags: adults reading ya, children's books, harry potter, movie adaptations, work, ya lit