Happy 10th, Deathly Hallows
Celebrating endings in an era without them
I know that stories are never really allowed to end, these days — there’ll always be another movie spin-off, another remake, another misguided attempt to cash in on the thing we loved that manages to forget what made us love it in the first place — but ten years ago today marked an end, for me, with the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
I know, I know: if you follow me on here (or if you’ve, you know, ever had a conversation with me in real life) you know that I still talk about Harry Potter WAY too much. But the core of the thing — the magic of waiting for a new book to come out, of speculating on what might happen next, of imagining our own version of how things might play out while the “real” ending was still unknowable, of experiencing that wait alongside millions of other readers, of knowing it all had to end but not quite knowing what that would mean — that is a thing I consider myself lucky to have been a part of, and which I doubt I’ll ever encounter in quite the same way again.
Last month, Facebook celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the first book’s publication. Declarations of house pride flooded my feed, and again, I was reminded of just how many of my friends I share this thing with, this thing I love, this story. It’s ties us together. When I meet someone new, Harry Potter is still the frame of reference most likely to be within both of our reach, which is what keeps it present in my life in a much more meaningful way than movie prequels or cursed plays could hope to do.
Perhaps out of character, I didn’t write a post on the twentieth anniversary. I am a person who puts too much stock in days, who has devoted far too much of my mental space for keeping hold of release dates, of the days I met friends, or moved to new places — of the chapter markers in my life. So this Facebook celebration seemed tailor-made for me, and yet I couldn’t bring myself to post.
That day, the day the first book came out — in England, over a full year before it was released in the US — never meant anything to me. I started reading them in 2001, when there were four books out and the first movie was already on the way. (My sister was assigned the first book in English class and came home one day having just purchased the second. She said it was good — I listened, thank goodness.) I’m sure most of you have your own origin story, too, the way you found these books or they found you, that doesn’t line up with that twenty year mark either.
We don’t have the beginning in common. But those of us who were reading those books as they were still being written, who pre-ordered on Amazon or waited in line at midnight at a Barnes and Noble — we do share an ending, ten years ago today.
Happy 10th, Deathly Hallows. All was well.
