In a move that proves that she’s not mad and is actually laughing, J. K. Rowling has written a novel that appears to be largely a collection of mean tweets she made up.
When she’s not too busy being a transphobe, Rowling also writes a series of odious crime novels under the name Robert Galbraith. They are not worth reading for a multitude of reasons, but mostly because unlike Harry Potter, which created a magical world for children, these books mostly seem to be about Rowling’s personal grievances. There’s always been a viciousness to this series, which revolve around the improbably named detective Cormorant Strike. One of the earlier books in the series, The Silkworm, featured a depiction of a trans woman being threatened by the protagonist with prison time, with the implication that she will be sexually assaulted there. This was not presented as a bad thing.
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You might think that Rowling would be better off just chilling in the literal castle she lives in and never writing another word ever again, but clearly she does not agree. The latest entry in the saga of Cormorant Strike is called The Ink Black Heart, and according to reviews, it is mainly about a transphobe who is harassed online by trans people. It not only contains page after page of incredibly accurate facsimiles of tweets, it is also 1,200 pages—longer than Stephen King’s IT, Dune and The Bible.
While all this is hilarious on its own, the tweets contained in the book are really something else. There are so many of them, and they are so specific, that it seems now irrefutable that Rowling spends more time on Twitter than even the most fervent K-Pop stans.
The wildest part of all of this is that Rowling claims this novel is not at all based on her life experiences. When you are sitting down and writing a fictional Twitter bio for an annoying person online that contains a list of their disabilities, you are targeting a demographic that is extremely specific—the people who know and care about what these aesthetic markers indicate. (These are the same people who heckle Rowling online for being awful, and the ones she denies maintain spacious rooms inside her head.)
For some people who spend far too much time on the internet, reading “fibromyalgia” or a reference to the spoon theory of disability in someone’s Twitter bio is a specific kind of red flag (and it should be noted that the thinking behind this is ableist in nature). Including these details makes it very clear that instead of leaping off a diving board into a pool of money like Scrooge McDuck, Rowling spends absolutely all of her time getting mad online. Her friends, presumably, are all just out of frame, laughing too.
