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I watched it today online, having missed it last night. Two observations:
1) My goodness, what a beautiful woman JKR is. Beautiful and unusual, with that strange crooked smile, but beautiful. That's something that's not often spoken about, but I know that if I knew her in person I would have serious trouble not to fall for her, hard.
2) JKR is a pretty ruthless woman. She in effect turned the whole thing into a JKR story - an affair of heroic matriarchs holding families together in reduced circumstances, valiant soldiers standing up against impossible odds, tragedy and triumph. It was a fine story, but like all works of art it was created by exclusion. JKR focused on a single strand of her descent, namely her mother's French grandfather - one-sixteenth of the possible lines of investigation - and managed to find all the things that suited her. I wonder whether she looked in any other direction, but if she did, we aren't told. Typically, she spoke several times of how her mother would have loved some features of the story, but never mentioned her father at all, even when she found evidence that her great-grandfather had been a war hero, gaining a well-deserved Croix de Guerre for a heroic rearguard action in which he took command of a squad covering the retreat of his regiment after severn hours of resistance against overwhelming German forces. Rowling's father was an army officer, but she even associates heroism in war with her mother and the female side of her family. JK Rowling, maker of heroes, has actually built a heroic legend out of her own family background; by which I don't mean that anything she said was false or misrepresented, but that she selected those things that were emotionally significant and valuable to her, so that, even though every detail of the story is true, the story as a whole is a product of JK Rowling's imagination.
(The rumour goes that JKR's father was - not to use stronger language - a very difficult parent indeed, and that if any Rowling character reflects him, it's probably Lucius Malfoy.)
1) My goodness, what a beautiful woman JKR is. Beautiful and unusual, with that strange crooked smile, but beautiful. That's something that's not often spoken about, but I know that if I knew her in person I would have serious trouble not to fall for her, hard.
2) JKR is a pretty ruthless woman. She in effect turned the whole thing into a JKR story - an affair of heroic matriarchs holding families together in reduced circumstances, valiant soldiers standing up against impossible odds, tragedy and triumph. It was a fine story, but like all works of art it was created by exclusion. JKR focused on a single strand of her descent, namely her mother's French grandfather - one-sixteenth of the possible lines of investigation - and managed to find all the things that suited her. I wonder whether she looked in any other direction, but if she did, we aren't told. Typically, she spoke several times of how her mother would have loved some features of the story, but never mentioned her father at all, even when she found evidence that her great-grandfather had been a war hero, gaining a well-deserved Croix de Guerre for a heroic rearguard action in which he took command of a squad covering the retreat of his regiment after severn hours of resistance against overwhelming German forces. Rowling's father was an army officer, but she even associates heroism in war with her mother and the female side of her family. JK Rowling, maker of heroes, has actually built a heroic legend out of her own family background; by which I don't mean that anything she said was false or misrepresented, but that she selected those things that were emotionally significant and valuable to her, so that, even though every detail of the story is true, the story as a whole is a product of JK Rowling's imagination.
(The rumour goes that JKR's father was - not to use stronger language - a very difficult parent indeed, and that if any Rowling character reflects him, it's probably Lucius Malfoy.)
