Happy 60th Birthday, Joanne Rowling Murray! Thank you for close to thirty years of challenging, even edifying fiction, for the joys of community your serious readers enjoy in discussing your work, and for your philanthropic efforts on behalf of women and children everywhere. The faculty at HogwartsProfessor all wish you many, many years.

As a birthday gift of sorts, Nick and John close off their month-long celebration of Rowling-Galbraith’s life and work with a follow-up look at yesterday’s review of the ‘Lost Child’ Golden Thread that runs through her stories. After cataloging the almost forty ‘for instances’ taken from the opera omnia in the penultimate entry in this series, Nick and John ask, “So What?” How does the possibility that Rowling had an induced abortion and is sufficiently unsettled by it that it inspires many even most of her books at least in part make any difference in understanding their artistry and meaning?

John’s answer is that, if read through the induced abortion lens, one can see shades of character reflecting Rowling’s thought on this subject. More importantly, each Harry Potter novel can be read as a defense of induced abortion, i.e., that each features something evil within a person having to be exteriorized and eliminated, a process that readers celebrate as a ‘win.’

A Kanreki celebration is a time when friends and family recognize the ending of a cycle and the beginning of a new life to the 60 year old celebrant. Here’s hoping Rowling Studies, as with Rowling herself, will enter another era with this idea, one that the author can confirm, deny, or ignore. Regardless of her answer, Serious Readers are left with the mysteries of the Pregnancy Trap and Lost Child Golden Threads for them to ponder.

Please do share your thoughts and questions in the comment boxes below. Nick and John hope to put together a Q&A post to answer the questions listeners have asked this month that they haven’t answered and new ones sent in by Monday. Paid subscribers will be invited to join them live for that discussion.

New to the Lake and Shed Kanreki Birthday series? Here’s what we’re doing:

On 31 July 2025, Joanne Murray, aka J. K. Rowling and Robert Galbraith, will be celebrating her 60th birthday. This celebration is considered a ‘second birth’ in Japan or Kanreki because it is the completion of the oriental astrological cycle. To mark JKR’s Kanreki, Dr John Granger and Nick Jeffery, both Nipponophiles, are reading through Rowling’s twenty-one published works and reviewing them in light of the author’s writing process, her ‘Lake and Shed’ metaphor. The ‘Lake’ is the biographical source of her inspiration; the ‘Shed’ is the alocal place of her intentional artistry, in which garage she transforms the biographical stuff provided by her subconscious mind into the archetypal stories that have made her the most important author of her age. You can hear Nick and John discuss this process and their birthday project at the first entry in this series of posts: Happy Birthday, JKR! A Lake and Shed Celebration of her Life and Work.

Tomorrow? The hope is that, after sleeping in for the first time in a month, that we can put together for easy reference an Index post that has links to every Lake and Shed post we’ve sent out this month — and news of our plans for August and beyond. Stay tuned!