So, that DFW post is still in the offing; reading More Flesh than Not has turned out to be more of a time-consuming activity than I thought. As a substitute, I offer this essay, which I have concluded I will never gather the energy to be able to hammer into saleable shape. (As usual, follow links for footnotes.)

***

1. Deathly Hallows

People ask, Oh, what’s your tattoo? I used to work behind the counter at a coffeeshop in the back of Housing Works Bookstore in SoHo, Manhattan; on weekends, or in the late afternoons, these were often pretty girls – skinny, younger than me. I learned to flirt with them, but when they asked, What’s your tattoo, there was this inflection point: they would judge me, one way or the other. It’s a triangle on my left forearm, encompassing a circle, bisected by a straight line. A rune, I guess you’d call it. I’d tell them what it was, and they’d say, Oh. Or they’d say, I thought so! I noticed a pattern: the younger they were, the more desperate to be sure you took them seriously, the less likely they were to like it.

2. Order of the Phoenix

I’m remembering a time when my father and brothers and I went to Falls City, Nebraska, the little town near the Missouri border that my dad still thinks of as home, more than fifty years after he last lived there. Four thousand people, down from six, cobblestone streets and a little downtown consisting of hundred-year-old buildings only about half occupied. When you order a salad there, you get a bowl of shredded iceberg lettuce smothered in ranch dressing.

I think I was twenty-four. Wait, I can check this for you … nope, twenty-three. You know how I know? It was the summer of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. We stayed in a motel on the edge of town, and mornings I would come out to find one of my brothers sitting on the picnic bench by the dirt parking lot, reading in the rising heat. Falls City was stifling, unlike anyplace I’d ever been before. I had spent four years in a part of Southern California where temperatures regularly touched 110 in the summertime, and nothing I’d experienced had prepared me for a 90 degree day with 100 percent humidity in Falls City.

I distained their book. I was a very serious person in those days, just more than a year out of college. Serious enough to be seriously depressed, drinking too much, gaining weight. I’d had a reasonably good job right out of school, at a newspaper, but I wasn’t any good at it. It wasn’t that I couldn’t do the writing. I couldn’t do the reporting. Reporting involved calling strangers on the phone and talking to them, and admitting when you made a mistake, that kind of thing. I was much too serious, and afraid of embarrassment, for either of those things. I don’t think I had ever been wrong in my whole life.

I realize now that the true Harry Potter mania had not yet gripped my brothers, because Mickey, who’s three years younger than me, managed to wait until Andy, who’s eight years younger, finished reading before he fell on the book. By the time Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince came out, two years later, none of us would be able to delay gratification like that. At that point, these were still just books they liked – anticipated, reread, but just liked, really. Maybe it’s that I hadn’t joined in. Maybe my seriousness really did put a damper on proceedings.

“That stuff will rot your brain,” I would say to Mickey if I found him reading it.

“You’re thinking of TV,” he’d say.

If I saw Andy with it in his hands: “You’re still reading those kids books?”

“They’re not kids books.”

Falls City was the very definition of nowhere. Outside town, corn grew thick on rolling hills. We drove out to Schubert, which had once had a population of about a thousand, but now had a population of one old lady and one kid tooling around on an ATV. Was my grandmother with us? My great uncle Milan? I think Milan must have been, because somebody told the story of having lived in Schubert in childhood, and walking the six miles to Falls City to watch movies projected on a sheet outside the high school.

Milan wasn’t that old – sixty-six, I want to say, maybe sixty-seven – but his body was just about ready to give out on him, like a paper sack that had been used for one too many lunches. He was skinny and hunched, probably had lung cancer though he wouldn’t go to the doctor. He and I both smoked. We would stand out on the lawn of my great aunt’s house, smoking, not really talking. He rode in the back seat of the car with my brothers and slept a lot. He had grandsons who had read Harry Potter. He had more to say to my brothers than to me, because they had something in common. The only thing I remember him saying directly to me was, “Every time I get in this town, I want to cause trouble.” This in the evening, with the lightning bugs winking around us. I had never seen lightning bugs before that trip. He hadn’t been back to Falls City since high school.

One afternoon we went out to Barada, where Milan and my grandmother had both been born. It consisted, as far as I remember, of a couple of tract houses down in a gully, and a graveyard up on top of a hill. There were considerably more dead people in that town than living ones. When we went to hike up to the cemetary, Milan got back in the car to sleep. He was sick, sure, but I don’t think he had any desire to go up among the graves, so close to the dead.

3. Philosopher’s Stone

I’m thinking about brotherhood now, and adulthood. My brothers and I weren’t really friends when we were kids. I was too much older than they were, too much invested in the status quo, too often aligned with our parents on the side of order. I had a bad temper. Once, when babysitting, I put my fist through a window after one of them locked me out of the house. I still have a scar on the ring finger of my right hand from that, twenty years later. It’s probably my fault we weren’t closer.

They fought like blazes, by the way, and though I was too clueless to notice, actively didn’t like each other for a long time. I went off to college when Andy was just 10 years old, and something happened while I was away: they got closer, and farther apart. Andy had been sickly all through his childhood, but was reasonably well by then. Maybe that made him available for physical abuse or something. I don’t know. I wasn’t there. But also he got older, and they started having interests in common. Harry Potter, chiefly. I would come home from school and they would have these unparsable hermeneutical conversations about Death Eaters and what Snape’s role in the whole business was. (This mostly took place during the lengthy lacuna between Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix, from the years 2000-2003, at the end of which Andy was fifteen, Mickey twenty. Snape, in the final moments of Goblet of Fire, is sent off to do something unspecified, probably dangerous, on Dumbledore’s orders.) I felt locked out.

I had been given the opportunity to get in on the ground floor, by the way, at the beginning of the winter holidays during my freshman year of college. Philosopher’s Stone had just been released in the U.S. that autumn. [1] On my way from college near Los Angeles to my parents’ house in Portland, I stopped at my friend Jocelyn’s place in Ashland, just north of the California border, for the night. Her mother had a copy of the book, and Jocelyn, who had flown up and arrived just the day before, had already read the whole thing.

“Read it,” Jocelyn’s mother said, upon discovering that I liked books. “It’s amazing.”

I sat down with it in their basement that night, where there was a spare bed in which I would be sleeping. “Mr and Mrs Dursley, of Number Four Privet Drive …” Ugh, a kids book. Mr and Mrs Dursley, indeed. I didn’t really care. I finished the first chapter, which seemed to be cloying, sub-Roald Dahl claptrap, and tossed the book aside.

Now. Rowling has herself has admitted that the first chapter of Philosopher’s Stone is “not the most popular thing I’ve ever written”, and the fact of the matter is that its tone and content don’t really feel of a piece with the rest of that book, let alone the much bigger, much darker ones to come. Does that mean that I shouldn’t be so hard on the younger me, and admit that maybe I detected what so many other people did in that first chapter, and gave up? Eh. To give up on a book after only one chapter, especically one as brief as “The Boy Who Lived” (17 pages, big type, in my paperback edition from 1999), is the mark of having gone into the reading intending to dislike it. I had heard of this Harry Potter. Other people liked it. I had resolved not to, and that was that.

I got home, and my brothers had joined the bandwagon. I sneered. Children reading children’s shit. Whatever.

4. The Prisoner of Azkaban

My family does Christmas, but not in the go-to-Mass sense, not even in the say-a-prayer-before-dinner sense. My mom’s an atheist, my father would probably best be described as a non-Christian deist, and our Christmas traditions are these: we are awakened by our mother, forced to drive around the neighborhood with her delivering cinnamon rolls to family friends (even the Jewish ones), we open presents, and then we go to the movies. We continued these traditions right up until my parents moved away from Portland, where I grew up, to Bend, where my mother grew up. That happened maybe five years ago. Still we go to the movies every year. Maybe one day I’ll be enough of an adult to set my own, new traditions, but I just had my 32nd Christmas and I still haven’t figured that out.

Anyway, I was going to say that the winter after that trip to Falls City, our Christmas movie was Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, but that turns out not to be true: the movie wasn’t released until the following year. God, what did I do with that year of my life? This was the period I tend to think of as “the long suck”. Depending on how I’m defining it, it usually covers the years from 2003-2005, when I started writing seriously (more on that later), but if I really broaden it out it one could say it lasted until 2009, when I moved to New York in a haze of heartbreak and rejection and started growing up a little, finally. For now, though, we’ll use the shorter time span, during which I was almost entirely celibate, definitely entirely single, drunk most every day, and ballooned up to about 250 pounds. I wasn’t a happy camper, I tell you what. That’s probably why I can’t remember most of what happened that year.

Anyway, Azkaban. Over my objections, it was chosen as our Christmas movie. I’m trying to reconstruct why I would have acquiesced. I can point to only two possible factors: (1) a total dearth of other movies I had any interest in seeing; and (2) the fact that director Alfonso Cuaron was also responsible for Y Tu Mama Tambien, just the kind of serious and adult movie I liked.[2] Anyway, I allowed myself to be dragged to the theatre, and then, somehow, allowed myself to be dragged into the story. It has become hip to nominate Azkaban as the best of the Potter films, I think precisely because it was directed by the daring and respected Cuaron, whose later Children of Men would cement him in the American consciousness as a storyteller to be reckoned with. But the fact of the matter is that the hip opinion is the correct one, in this instance: I’ve seen all the Potter films a half-dozen times at least, and it’s remarkable the degree to which Cuaron managed to coax emotionally complex performances from his 13-year-old actors that none of them would never really equal again, even as they reached adulthood. Aside from that, Azkaban is the last of the books whose story can truly be captured onscreen – even then, it’s a stretch – and the first two Potter films were not just about children but childish, told without the panache or depth that the stories cry out for. The world of Hogwarts is nothing if not decorated, and Azkaban captures that world’s detail, its cold beauty and its filth, in a way that none of the other Potter films ever would (though at least the later ones would try).[3] It is a mystic kismet chord: the story small enough, the palate big enough, to make a real movie happen.

Suffice it to say I was enraptured, unexpectedly, totally. The bleak, rainy, owly world of grief and pain and escape that Harry and his friends occupied was just what I needed in order to embody, and to flee, the long suck. Shortly after Christmas we went down to a cabin my parents owned in Central Oregon, and I spent the entire trip buried in a mass market paperback of Prisoner of Azkaban purchased from the books aisle at the Safeway in the nearest town. Certain things about the story were confusing, of course, without having read the first two books, and reading the tale in this weird, elliptical manner, starting in the middle, would spoil some of the surprises, but also leave little gifts for me upon rereading: the first time I read Order of the Phoenix, for instance, the heartbreaking scene at the hospital in which Gilderoy Lockhart displays his “joined-up writing” ability meant nothing to me. On a second tour, I saw him for what he was: a victim of pride, yes, but fundamentally a person undone by inborn flaws, by insecurity – in short, someone I could recognize.

5. Chamber of Secrets

I have a question about favorites. Why do children and adolescents have them, but adults tend to relinquish the idea? Is it that, as adults, we have too much information, have seen too many things, to pick and choose? Or is it that we have ceased to care the way we once did? I still love books, and (to a lesser extent) movies and music, but nothing I read makes me feel totally shot through with light the way I did when I first laid hands on Rilke’s Duino Elegies at seventeen, or when I first heard Nirvana’s In Utero at thirteen. Like all writers I go magpie-like through my bookshelf, taking this joke from Jonathan Lethem, that sentence structure from Jane Austen – but fundamentally, I will never absorb these things into my core the way I did the rhythms of Dubliners or The English Patient, both of which I read the summer between my junior and senior years of high school.

Perhaps, as adults, it’s that we reserve our favoriting for people, at least if we’re romantics, which I guess I must be. Lovers, spouses, our children: these come to take the place of the works of art we wore as badges in youth. Right? At least if we’re lucky enough to love, and be loved?

I’m thinking about this for a lot of complicated reasons. First, easiest, is that it might explain why my “favorite” Potter book has migrated backwards over time: when first I read them, Goblet of Fire definitely held pride of place, I think because it seemed kind of adult compared to the earlier books – it’s certainly much longer – and also because it didn’t include Harry’s obnoxious moral crisis or the odious Professor Umbridge, both of which stain Order of the Phoenix, if not artistically, then as an experience of pure enjoyment. [4] As I have grown older, however, and better acquainted with the realities of adulthood – its responsibilities, the moral and spiritual and emotional razor-wire one must constantly scale or cut through as one negotiates life – I’ve become less attached to the idea of it. So I began to tell people that Prisoner of Azkaban was my favorite of the books. Eventually even that came to feel too serious, too ambiguous for me, and I now claim Chamber of Secrets as my favorite – but mostly because I have to claim something to be taken seriously in the perpetually-adolescent world of Potter fandom; the truth is, I love all of them equally but differently, which is just the kind of equivocal answer my parents used to annoy me with when I asked them what their favorite movie was or which singer’s voice they would steal if they could.[5]

Second, more complex, has to do with my parents, and my brothers. I’ve known people who have told me that their parents clearly played favorites, and in fact I’ve seen it in action: a sister made to do laundry every day while her brother drinks his way out of college; a jocky son given praise, a nerdy one left to his books. My parents, thankfully, didn’t do this. If they had favorites, they never really let it show in their behavior. But, too, it’s more complicated than that.

I think I said before that my youngest brother, Andy, was sickly as a child. That was an understatement, or maybe an elision for the purposes of efficiency. I didn’t think I was going to be covering this ground, to tell you the truth. Andy, from infancy, manifested a whole constellation of disorders which damaged just about every part of his body other than his brain and his stomach. Though he was born healthy – strapping, actually; his birth weight outstripped mine by a good two pounds – very quickly things began to go wrong. He developed a form of histiocytosis, a family of rare and ill-understood disorders that mystify doctors almost as much as they do laymen; the upshot, for Andy, was that benign tumors began growing all over his skeleton: I can remember him awakening in the night with his upper thigh in wrenching pain; he had a lesion on his right shoulderblade that stemmed from a tumor there which had shattered the bone and caused him to learn to do certain things (like throw a baseball, or a punch) left-handed; his face became, for lack of a more delicate way of saying it, deformed. At every turn, we were told that a certain thing probably wouldn’t happen, and then it did. He also stopped producing growth hormone, so that, between the ages of two and three, he grew not at all – he weighed a fairly normal 27 pounds on his second birthday, and the same 27 pounds on his third, which put him well below the 10th percentile for children his age. He also developed thyroid problems, and a kind of diabetes that makes it impossible to retain water in the body without the aid of medication. To this day, he has to give himself a daily battery of shots and pills just to keep his systems functioning; in childhood, the treatments ranged from radiation that made his hair fall out to a clear liquid that had to be blown up his nose via a plastic tube. I won’t even begin to go into the various surgeries he had as a teenager, all on his head and face, because they are too gruesome to contemplate and I don’t wish to disturb people.

The result, anyway, was that a huge proportion of my parents’ mental and spiritual energy was expended on his illnesses and treatments. Though they did heroic work to keep Mickey and I from feeling neglected, the fact is that by necessity we were left to manage ourselves a lot of the time – no one went over my report cards with me, or demanded to know where I was off to on a summer afternoon, or quizzed me about how school was. Perhaps this is because I gave them no reason to. I was a good kid, and secretive to boot; maybe Mickey, who acted out more, received more scrutiny than I did. And I don’t wish to exaggerate: it’s not as though we raised ourselves. My father coached baseball for all three of his sons through the sixth grade; my mother made dinner every night and made sure we all sat around the table together, even if – as it often did – this resulted in a lot of shouting just to make ourselves heard over other people’s shouting.

Perhaps it was just a different time, a time before helicopter dads and tiger mothers, when kids were allowed to spend all summer roaming the streets in packs; I grew up in the 80s, on the cusp of Gen X and another, not-so-easily-defined generation brought about by a baby boomlet that happened when actual Boomers reached child-rearing age. What I remember best about childhood was just how many kids there were everywhere: if you wanted a game of double-or-nothing, or wall-ball, or soccer, all you had to do was wander around the neighborhood with a ball under your arm and eventually you’d collect enough people to play. Nearly all of my friends were oldest siblings, that might have had something to do with it also. We took care of ourselves because we were used to it, all of us, not because our parents played favorites or because our younger brothers were sickly or because our moms and dads had fancy jobs that kept them at work 60 hours a week. We liked our own recognizance.

I’m sorry, I’ve wandered off-topic, haven’t I? I’m thinking about Chamber of Secrets because it’s my favorite of a group from which there can be no favorites, in the way that Andy was the favorite of us brothers: not because he was, but because he had to be. Too, there’s a way in which Harry Potter was a last vestige of childhood, a thing that I could love purely, without avarice or lust, a way out of my adulthood – and so I have picked a favorite, Chamber of Secrets, because Gilderoy Lockhart is the best pure comic creation in the series, because the idea of a diary that both listens and speaks makes me wish desperately that the world really worked like that, because Harry is still a kid in its pages, and because its title is the most poetic: childhood was, for me, a chamber of secrets all its own.

6. Goblet of Fire

I’m wondering about memory now. I wonder about it a lot. I used to believe I had one of the world’s great memories, so full was my head of details and images and stories, but as time has gone on, as I have checked the records to find that the facts often don’t track with the tales I have told myself, it’s come to my attention that what I really have is an extremely vivid imagination. Where my memory fails, my imagination builds worlds – realistic, but not real. I have a memory of a red hat I used to wear sitting on the desk of a girl I dated in college, a lamp fixed over it so that its brim casts a long shadow onto the bed, the floor, her body. If I asked her about that, would she tell me she didn’t even own a lamp? Possibly. I have a memory of rounding second base after hitting a home run in Little League, and in this memory people shout and cheer and it feels like I’m flying – but crowds didn’t really gather for our Little League games, not crowds of the sort I hear in this memory; usually the audience consisted of a couple of parents, a passel of bored younger sisters, maybe the teams waiting to take the field after our game ended.

I have a memory of the moment that Harry Potter began to build a bridge between me and my younger brothers. In this memory I sit on one side of the little kitchen table in the house where my parents lived after I moved out. This is either December of 2004 or January of 2005. I am twenty-four; Mickey is twenty-one; Andy is just about to turn seventeen. They sit on the other side of the table, eating Thai food, and I have Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the big, hardback edition I’ve borrowed from Andy, spread out before me. I must be about halfway through. I’m speculating on the fate and future of Sirius Black:

“I dunno, it seems like maybe he’s a fifth columnist or something. Like he might actually be evil. That would be really interesting, if it turns out Sirius is bad and Snape is good –”

They smirk. See, they know something I don’t yet know: Sirius Black is dead. Rowling greased him at the end of Order of the Phoenix, which they both read almost two years ago, in the hot afternoon of Falls City, Nebraska.

“That’s interesting,” Mickey says.

“Well, how about it?”

“How about what?” Andy says.

“Do you think I might be right?”

“I really couldn’t say.”

Did that really happen? Were Mickey and Andy and I really so distant from each other that it took this moment, in which they both gave me the great gift of not telling, for us to bond? Or is it just another story I tell myself to make sense of a formless and stupid life that I fundamentally don’t feel very good about?

I mean, we certainly loved each other before then, in a nobody-hits-my-brother-but-me kind of way. I can remember chasing off idiot kids who stared at Andy’s odd looks. I can remember long evenings playing catch with Mickey in the front yard, which we did so often that we wore big dead patches in the grass.[6] I administered Andy’s medications, picked up Mickey from soccer practice without being asked; we went to the movies and played Zelda and stuff. Maybe we were friends before Harry Potter. But then my life doesn’t make much sense. Maybe I’m too invested in a narrative in which I used to be arrogant, callous, unreflective, but am now humble, empathetic, knowledgeable. Maybe I was less the former then, and am less the latter now, than I would like to admit.

Oh, whatever. Whether it was Harry Potter that did it or not, my brothers and I are friends now, and I can’t really imagine a test that our friendship would fail. We live thousands of miles apart; we have lives that no longer include hours spent playing video games together – and yet there’s still a bond, an understanding, that exists between us, even at a distance.

7. Half-Blood Prince

I am put in mind of the long suck again. How to explain it? Until I was 22, I was a machine of being good at stuff, academically successful, the kind of person at whom the word potential was hurled a lot. I was fairly sure I was destined to win awards and change the world as a poet, which of course now seems silly – not only because my poetry wasn’t that good, but because poets don’t change the world anymore, if they ever did. Until time came for me to change the world and be given my awards, I would …

And there’s the problem, you see. I had no interim plans, no sense that things might not go exactly as I expected them to. I got that job on the Menlo Park Almanac, and I made a hash out of it. I bailed. I failed. I went back to Portland and sank like a stone into a life of dissolution, unemployment. I stopped writing. I had been writing since I was five years old, but living in a house in a part of town colloquially known as Felony Flats, I was too fat, too stupid, too spiritually indigent to scribble a poem or a story. This, of course, was a symptom of having always taken myself too seriously: everybody quits a job now and then. Everybody fucks up. But I felt like the only person who had ever bollocksed an opportunity, and I resolved to piss my life away in response.

This I know is true: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince rescued me from my self-pity. The reasons are dumb and convoluted, but in the summer of 2005, when Half-Blood Prince was released, I found myself driving down to that cabin my parents owned in order to sequester myself from people who might accidentally spoil the plot before I could get my hands on the book. Then I bought it at 8 AM the day it came out anyway – drove the 7 miles into Bend, the nearest town, plugged my iPod into my ears so nobody could say anything to spoil it, and purchased a copy I already knew would be redundant within the week. I regret this decision not at all.

The first reading of a new Potter book is best done alone, in a space where one can move around a lot, because the fact is that you’re going to be staring at the page for a goodly period of time. The last few books are very long, and I, personally, am a stupidly slow reader. I know people who gobbled up Half-Blood Prince (607 pages, in the British hardback I have on the table next to me now) in five or six hours; it took me from the moment I returned to my parents’ cabin, about 9.30 in the morning, until well after dark, which would mean something in excess of 12 hours. I lay on the couch, I sat at the table, I stood at the kitchen counter while I made spaghetti, I lounged on the porch swing with the book across my thighs. I’ll admit something now that I don’t usually include in this story: I did all of this completely naked. It was July, and hot out in the high desert, and that cabin isn’t air conditioned. I’m not sure there’s even a fan out there. So I stripped down to my birthday suit and I read Harry Potter, unseen by anybody.[7] That day, 16 July 2005, was an island in the ocean of my depression, and I clung to its shores.

When I put the book down, my mind reeled. I had been calling Mickey and Andy throughout the day, getting updates on where they were; I called them now, but neither had finished yet. I was able to return the favor they gave me the previous winter: I did not tell them that Dumbledore was dead, though I knew, though I was desperate to say. Unable to spew my theories about Horcruxes and the mysterious R. A. B. and the question of whether or not Dumbledore had really died, I found a notebook somewhere, pulled a pen out of my backpack, and began to scrawl my own version of the seventh book. It was the first, and last, piece of fanfiction I would ever write.

The reason for this is not that I don’t find value in fanfiction, or that I didn’t find that project rewarding. As a matter of fact, I pursued it for several days, writing in a cramped hand that became sloppier and sloppier as I poured beer on top of my enthusiasm. It ballooned to some 90 pages, though I had a sense after about page 40 that I would never finish it: I had another idea, an idea with characters I had invented myself, a storyline, a setting – I was going to move away from Portland and write my own novel. And I did just that. That the book was what my friend Peter would call a “practice novel” doesn’t really matter; I was writing seriously, and have done so nearly every day for the past six-and-a-half years. Half-Blood Prince got my dumb ass going again.

I spent a year and a half in Bend, writing, drinking. I won’t pretend I wasn’t bored and lonely a lot of the time. I won’t pretend my drinking habit was healthy. But it wasn’t any worse there than it had been before, and at least I was doing something. I also began riding a bicycle, and all the excess weight began to fall off – a process that continued until, now, I weigh less than I did even in high school. During that period when I lived in Bend, Mickey and Andy and I cemented the friendship that had begun over the spoilers they refused to share with me while I read Goblet of Fire: we all waited with bated breath for the release of the final book, and would call each other with brand-new speculations we had just dreamed up, insights into characters we hadn’t pieced together before, that kind of thing. Through this, we found other passions in common: baseball, Veronica Mars, politics. They would come visit and we would play video games and watch Potter movies and listen to Potter audiobooks and drink beer. Life wasn’t perfect, but it was better. The long suck was over.

8. Deathly Hallows Redux

People ask, Oh, what’s your tattoo? Pretty girls ask as a way to indicate their interest, which is nice – when I was fat, and drunk all the time, I might as well have been invisible – but then comes that inflection point. I never lie, not about this. I tell them: It’s the mark of the Deathly Hallows, from Harry Potter. Sometimes noses wrinkle, usually on the younger ones who still feel the need to reject things in order to gain acceptance. It’s okay. I tell them: It’s also called the Mark of the Three Brothers. Shortly after the release of the last book, which is named after three powerful magical objects once possessed by three brothers, Mickey, Andy and I got the mark of the Deathly Hallows tattooed on our persons: Mickey on his left calf, Andy on his left shoulderblade, and I on my left forearm. So I tell the girls whose noses wrinkle: My brothers and I all have the same one. And usually their noses unwrinkle, and they say, Oh, that’s okay, then. Well, it’s okay whether you think so or not, but thanks. It took me a long time to get it.