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Allegedly, J.K. Rowling wrote the Dementors of her Harry Potter series as manifestation of her depression. Dark, phantom things whose sinister ability to suck the joy out of a person leaves them as empty, morbid husks of what they once were. Using fiction, Rowling was able to convey the emptiness she felt from the toils that come from a mind plagued by seemingly-infinite sadness.
We can take a lesson from Rowling in this regard. We all have our demons—anyone who says otherwise is a liar. We have struggles with mental illness, bad habits, painful memories. Old sins haunt us in the dark. We fight to keep our feral tempers on leashes. We don’t want to speak about them, we’d rather throw them into the closet like an ugly old sweater given by a great aunt.
Before I sat down to write this, I was struggling with a particular demon of mine. An old memory rising its corpse-gray hand out of the chasm of my mind to strangle me with anxiety. So what did I do? I put it into a short story. I took my demon and made it into a monster to be vanquished by the hero of my story. And it was cathartic. Giving life to the shadows that haunt our minds and seeing them eradicated in imagination can be great medicine.
This is seen in Harry Potter. The Dementors are defeated by a Patronus charm, a form of magic that takes on the shape of an animal shining in resplendent light. This magic is born from the user’s happiest memory. By writing about her depression, Rowling was able to articulate how she might defeat it in her stories: with light and happiness. This is one of the great functions of fiction: it brings light to our darkness.
For the epitaph of Coraline, another book with monsters and darkness, Neil Gaiman inserts this quote from G.K Chesterton: “Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.” How compelling. By writing and reading stories, it is possible for us to defeat the dragons in our lives.
Isn’t that a wonderful thought?
Work Cited: Gaiman, Neil. Coraline. 2002. Harper-Perennial, 2006.
