JK Rowling new book — chronic illness references

I guess it is: https://www.healthline.com/health/spoon-theory-chronic-illness-explained-like-never-before#4

Rowling clearly gets things completely wrong and her approach is inexcusable.
But I do recognise what I think she has encountered and extrapolated from.

S4ME is a safe place. I continue to be astonished at how it manages to be a friendly, constructive place to talk about ideas and feelings and end up feeling it was worth dipping in, even if on odd occasions one's pride gets a dent or two.

My previous experience with being a board member for another forum brought me into contact with other internet groups where if you did not chant the group mantra you had the very nastiest abuse hurled at you. I know exactly what Simon Wessely was complaining about - I just don't think he had any right to grumble. I got the same stuff, despite trying to be on the patients' side! The nasty stuff one sees on medical Reddit boards has its patient equivalent. One cannot be blind to that. We have encountered here one or two very strange individuals over the last decade who might some of the time appear as stalwart advocates but at other times showed a very different side. I won't say more.

But I suspect that Rowling's picture may be more directly fed by experiences with medical charities. We don't need to go very far to think of hints. We have been discussing cosy groupthink at places like MEA recently. The same used to apply to AfME. Fixed ideas have not been alien to Forward ME either. Maybe Rowling had a bad experience with the MS charity. Perpetual 'patient' chairpersons and the like have often seemed to have remarkably little evidence of having the illness concerned, or at least to have recovered so long ago that nobody could tell.

And these organisations form the main public profile of many chronic diseases. I am not saying in any way that Rowling is justified but I can see how someone might come to her position.

It makes me wonder what it is about S4ME that protects it from any of this. Nobody here uses the forum as an ego trip. Thank God.

It would be interesting to talk to Rowling and try to make her see sense. Maybe that 7M£ of sense we were talking about. Maybe Chris Ponting might meet her on the bus one day...

 

Sure, but it seems like a basic criteria that most authors would require these days (given the political winds) - that disabled characters in the book portrayed by actually disabled actors.

People have been begging her for awareness or funding for years, and only met with silence. I think it is clear what she thinks of ME/CFS...

 

i hear you, just for clarification my comment was meant to be sarcastic

 

It's the 'social contagion' idea again, I think. 'All these people can't really be disabled/neurodivergent/trans, they're just latching onto a trendy "identity" because they want attention/secondary gains/an excuse for their inadequacies...'

 

Maybe partly that it started as a learning community and has stayed that way? People are willing to call out bullshit, but they've developed ways to do it that aren't aggressive or personal. They don't claim status either.

There's an unspoken understanding that some people are better able to handle direct challenge than others, and that folk new to ME/CFS may arrive with theories that they think are explanations, but aren't.

One of the things that impresses me most is the way new members are led to understand that we really don't have any answers or treatments. It almost seems to be dashing people's hopes, yet they often stick around and pitch into discussions in a positive way.

 

I can imagine.

 

AFAIK, authors license a TV company to use their work and that's an end of their involvement.

 

I'm positive that a lot of what makes S4ME a safe place is the hard work of the mods. I'm constantly grateful for it.

 

JKR has alienated a large % of her fan base in the past few years . Key actors from Harry Potter have felt the need to state that they do not share her opinions.

My daughter was a huge Harry Potter fan and virtually consumed all the books in primary school . She would not touch anything produced by JKR now.

 

I watched the Strike television series last night. The acting is quite entertaining but the script a bit pedestrian and the stuff about the net and anomie pretty obscure.

My impression is that Rowling wants to mix a popular crime story with some mind worm she has about people trusting each other and the way the net has made it easy to avoid even deciding who to trust - just moving on. It all seems a bit self-absorbed. If I get fed up with the net I go birdwatching. Quite often I meet up with some birding chums I trust and we have a good natter. Maybe I should go back to watching David Attenborough but he tends to lay the moral dilemmas on a bit thick too these days.

 

This is a long read, published in 2022. I've just clipped some quotes:

Medium
Alicia Hendley

Sept 22, 2022

https://aliciahendley.medium.com/jk...e-problem-of-misplaced-authority-5cf6a2ab5210

 

I read the Harry Potter books when they first came out as all my godchildren were obsessed with them. My German goddaughter at ten queued for hours to get the English new editions because she could not bear to wait for the German translations. I was disappointed then at how poorly they were written, though you can not doubt her children’s books were brilliant story telling. Though the writing did improve over successive books they are the only books I have read where I preferred the films. I have not read any of her adult fiction.

I decided not to watch last night’s TV dramatisation as I suspected I would just get annoyed. I never understood why she was so insistent on expressing her views on trans issues in a way that seemed designed to trigger controversy. Presumably she feels obliged in some way to strongly put over her views on specific issues but why has she chosen trans issues and now invisible illnesses to be so publicly myopic about?

 

I watched episode 1 last night, and apart from a reference to lupus, nothing was said in the initial episode about ME. I'll be watching episodes 2 and 3 today.

Given that JKR is married to a doctor; that her late mother died in her mid 40s from MS; that JKR has been a patron to the MS Society Scotland and donated £25.3 million for MS research it seems particularly nasty.

 

Sad to think that for many women pre scan availability MS was an invisible illness

 

I understand, I worked in a related field. What I was trying to say is that they could have a role.

Any writer who thinks cripping up is unacceptable in the portrayal of their work could say so. Anyone with a platform could help amplify the voices of disabled creatives, whose audience is limited because they're shut out of many high profile jobs.

Not to do so is a choice.

I'm embarrassed about how much my industry historically got wrong on disability representation and access, but at least it understood this. It had got that far by the 1970s.

 

Reposting from further back in the thread

JKR was the majority shareholder in the TV production company Brontë Film and TV (which she created along with her literary agent) which produces the Strike series. The company is 'Brontë Film and TV'. Her literary agent Neil Blair is still the director of the TV production company.



The Independent March 2023

'JK Rowling production company reports 74 per cent drop in profit'

'The company was established in 2012, and focuses largely on adaptations of Rowling’s work.'

'Rowling founded Brontë with her literary agent Neil Blair. She is the majority shareholder.'
(til 2023)

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-...owling-bronte-film-tv-net-worth-b2311861.html



Though JKR seems to no longer be an officer/Director of the TV production company Brontë Film and TV.

Now there is still the director, Neil Lyndon Marc Blair, JKR's Literary Agent who is also the single Director of the company 'Ink Black Heart'.


Companies House info:
BRONTE FILM AND TELEVISION LIMITED
https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/08309584/officers


THE INK BLACK HEART LIMITED
https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/14398101/officers

.

 

My main impression watching the clips is that this is as badly written as it's poorly researched. And about as realistic a portrayal of ME/CFS as Reefer madness was of cannabis. So I really don't know why this was even produced. It just looks like someone badly wrote this in a fit entirely to punch down. Some lines are just so random and weird, thrown there just to raise the old anger-o-meter.

But anyway Rowling has spent most of her last decade being a billionaire who spends most of her waking time raging against discriminated people and things that don't affect her life one bit.