My Potter affair started when I was a grad student and continued as I moved through a number of jobs in the book and film industries. To my co-workers, Harry and his friends were viewed less as characters and more as exemplars of the lottery that literary agents and film executives often feel they’re playing — a tale that suggested that if we, too, combed through the slush and took every submission seriously, we might find the humble gem that would make our careers. To me it was different, but I played along, gamely considering every last cover letter claiming that some new release was “the next Harry Potter.” I knew they were all wrong. I’d never feel about another story the way I felt about Harry.

Tied to my fandom, as for a lot of Potterphiles, was a sense of loyalty to the series; the idea that the books I loved were not just good but Good, something to believe in even if they were a product. J. K. Rowling’s story seemed miraculous: each book was better than the last, and the later films improved significantly on the early, Chris Columbus-directed disappointments. While other franchises (like “Star Wars”) alienated their fans with subpar prequels and embarrassing characters, the Harry Potter books never abused me. (This despite the early novels’ focus on Dobby, a house-elf who threatened to be the Jar Jar Binks of the series but turned into a resonant, or at least tolerable, character all his own.) I remained loyal to Harry because he remained loyal to me.

As the books became popular beyond imagining — as news reports credited them for a rebirth of reading among kids, even as critics attacked them as poorly written and simplistic — I also became a defender. In conversation and e-mail and on message boards, I took umbrage at high-culture gatekeepers, like A. S. Byatt and Harold Bloom, who dismissed the books that, to my mind, were getting darker, more interesting and more complex.

That this kind of infatuation is akin to the first blush of romantic love didn’t escape me — especially when that affection began to overtake my ability to function as a grown human being. The night the fifth novel was released, for example, I had dinner with the partners of the law firm that had recently hired my wife. I spent the whole evening lost in a fever of anticipation, barely able to participate in adult conversation as I thought of the object that at that moment was sitting in a box in the receiving room of the bookstore down the street. (It made me only slightly less embarrassed to know that my wife was feeling the exact same way.) The tale that had been interrupted three years earlier was about to restart: how could Harry return to the Dursleys after barely escaping with his life? How would he and his friends respond to the death of Cedric? What did it mean that Harry and Voldemort had wands with the same phoenix-feather core? All this seemed so much more pressing than the firm’s proud history. After drinks with the associates, my wife and I raced to the bookstore in our business garb and, at the stroke of midnight, bought two copies of the fat hardcover. We ended our celebratory evening by staying up another two hours reading side by side in bed.