It’s difficult to say what Harry Potter did for me, or the world for that matter.  Some say it was a time to return to childhood and slip into an imaginary world, but for me it was never really about that.  It was about escape and magic.  It was about slipping away not to something, but from something, and that was my life.  I wanted desperately to go to Hogwarts; I still do.  There was a girl I knew in grade school who wanted to badly to go that she stopped going to school, stopped leaving her house, and simply sat in rereading the books.  ”All she wants is to be a wizard,” her mother would say.  This was in eighth grade.

I didn’t blame her.  There was something about real life that was so unappealing and so appalling and it was no wonder that people would want to disappear from it.  Everyday there is trauma, but it’s not the trauma that takes place in the magical world, but it’s the everyday trauma that’s far worse.  Perhaps the world isn’t going to end and there’s no true evil, but it’s about as bad as it can get.  You watch people around you die and move away and leave you; you watch people yell at you and tell you they don’t love you; you watch the people you care about be bad people.  You fuck up and then have to deal with it, without powers, but simply with the awkwardness of human life.  And the only real time when none of this is going on, apart from reading the books, is when you’re dreaming.

I think this pretty much sums up how my collective generation feels about the Harry Potter series.

By the way, I enjoyed the movie.