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Many followers of “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling are pointing out that her newest book appears to bear some similarities to her own life, as the plot revolves around an artist who is doxxed online.
“The Ink Black Heart,” written under Rowling’s pseudonym, Robert Galbraith, follows Edie Ledwell, the creator of a popular YouTube cartoon who is “persecuted by a mysterious online figure,” according to the book’s Amazon description. The novel, which was released Tuesday, is the sixth book in her thriller series “Cormoran Strike.”
NBC News has not reviewed a copy of the book.
According to Rolling Stone, the character Edie Ledwell “sees internet trolls and her own fandom turn on her after the cartoon was criticized as being racist and ableist, as well as transphobic for a bit about a hermaphrodite worm.”
Online, some suggested that life seems to imitate art in Rowling’s latest book.
“Based on what I’ve seen on Twitter regarding the new JK Rowling book, somebody really shouldn’t have taken ‘write what you know’ half as seriously as she apparently did,” one user wrote.
Rowling first drew headlines in 2019 when she publicly supported Maya Forstater, a British tax specialist who was fired over tweets that were deemed to be anti-trans. Over the years, Rowling has doubled down on her views in several blog posts and tweets, which many critics have called transphobic.
A representative for Rowling declined a request for comment Tuesday and referred NBC News to the Q&A section of the book’s website.
A question in the Q&A asks, “How much of the novel is drawn from your own experience?” Rowling states the book “isn’t about my experience of — as being a creator. My experience — if I wrote about my experience as a creator, it would look very different.”
“I have never created a book — and this book certainly isn’t created from my own experience — you know, with a view to talking about my own life,” she said. “That doesn’t mean, of course, that your own life experience isn’t in the book.”
However, because she had been planning “this book for so long,” she said, “a couple of the things that happen in this book have since happened to me.”
“And so, I would like to be very clear that I haven’t written this book as an answer to anything that happened to me,” she said. “Although I have to say when it did happen to me, those who had already read the book in manuscript form were — are you clairvoyant? I wasn’t clairvoyant, I just — yeah, it was just one of those weird twists. Sometimes life imitates art more than one would like.”
Jo Yurcaba contributed.
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