She’s full of secrets! J.K. Rowling revealed in a new interview that she wrote a fairy tale manuscript last year — and scrawled it across her 50th birthday party dress.
“The theme of my 50th birthday — which I held at Halloween, even though that’s not really my birthday — was come as your own private nightmare,” the Harry Potter author, 51, told CNN in an interview published on Monday, July 10. “And I went as a lost manuscript. And I wrote over a dress most of that book.”
However, the story may never hit bookstores. “I don’t know whether it will ever be published, but it’s actually hanging in a wardrobe currently,” Rowling admitted.
The British scribe, whose real name is Joanne, also opened up to CNN about why she continues to use a pen name after all these years. “I quite like J.K.,” she said, noting that her publisher recommended using her initials rather than her first name in an attempt to “disguise” her gender. “I wouldn’t have chosen it for that reason … but I was so grateful to be published, if they told me to call myself Rupert, I probably would have done [it] to be honest with you.”
After publishing her seven mega-successful Harry Potter books, Rowling wrote a series of crime fiction novels under a second pen name, Robert Galbraith. “I actually quiet like having a pen name, because I feel that’s — to an extent, that feels like an identity and then … in [my] private life, I’m Jo Murray,” she told CNN, using the surname from her marriage to husband Neil Murray. “And it feels like quite a nice separation.”
