Who among us hasn’t thought to themselves, “Man, I sure wish a once beloved children’s author would bravely tackle the pressing issues of cancel culture and social justice warriors in a 1,000 page novel.” Lucky for us, J.K. Rowling — sorry, Robert Galbraith — penned a new novel, The Ink Black Heart, that fits that bill to a T. And although Rowling insists the book is not personal, it bears some striking resemblances to her own life, including some controversies she’s started online.
The novel tells the story of one Edie Ledwell, the creator of a popular YouTube cartoon, who asks a private detective for help with an anonymous online harasser named “Anomie,” Rolling Stone reports. Specifically, the cartoon gets criticized for being racist, ableist, and transphobic, including a specific incident of a “hermaphroditic worm.” While these broader topics do not necessarily indicate that the book marks Rowling’s pivot to autofiction, Ledwell is also specifically “doxxed with photos of her home plastered on the internet” and “subjected to death and rape threats for having an opinion.” The former actually did happen to Rowling, although again, whether that was “doxxing” is debatable. Rowling has also many times mentioned that she has gotten death and rape threats in conjunction with defending her stance on trans people.
In the book, Ledwell isn’t taken seriously by the private detectives, which also happened to Rowling when the Scottish Police agreed that she hadn’t been doxxed. Naturally, she’s found murdered in a cemetery mere days later. The detectives then seemingly learn their lesson about not believing women, and they become embroiled in the search for Anomie’s true identity.
Rowling recently went on The Graham Norton Radio Show to assert that the similarities to her own life were a coincidence. “I should make it really clear after some of the things that have happened the last year that this is not depicting [that],” Rowling said. “I had written the book before certain things happened to me online. I said to my husband, ‘I think everyone is going to see this as a response to what happened to me,’ but it genuinely wasn’t. The first draft of the book was finished at the point certain things happened.”
We’re sure that the book isn’t autobiographical in the same way that her previous Robert Galbraith book isn’t transphobic. In response to accusations that a “cross-dressing” serial killer character in her last book was a transmisogynist trope, Rowling hit back and said that the character was based on two separate real-life murderers, both of whom served as inspiration for the similarly transmisogynistic character of Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs.
Rowling has also denied that her pen name Robert Galbraith is a nod to famous conversion therapist Robert Galbraith Heath, instead saying that it was inspired by Robert F. Kennedy and “Ella Galbraith,” a name she called herself when she was young.
That’s an awful lot of coincidences for this book to overcome, but we’re sure Rowling, whose net worth is over $1 billion, will be just fine.
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