Harry Potter fan or not, this is a moment of insight, so stick with me here.
For complete transparency: I’ve reread the Harry Potter books, relistened to the audiobooks, and rewatched the films more times than I care to admit. I grew up with them. In my honest opinion, it’s fantasy, comfort, and one of the best stories ever written. I initially wavered on the films being remade into a series, but the more I think about it, the more excited I am for that first two-hour episode on Christmas Day!
I recently pressed play (again!) on Philosopher’s Stone (for non-fans, that’s book one), and the early chapters have had a hold on me like never before. So much so that I woke up at 3am thinking, “I need to write this in a blog!” because I’m struck by how much Harry’s childhood resembles Dave Pelzer’s, as he describes it in A Child Called It.
If you’ve never read A Child Called It, it is far from fantasy. It’s harrowing infact, and not for the faint-hearted. It’s the real-life memoir of a boy who was abused by his mother and spent much of his time locked away in a cupboard.
Of course, I’m not saying the two stories are the same. J.K. Rowling wrote a fantasy. Dave Pelzer wrote his own life. But there are parallels which are hard to ignore.
Harry Potter’s bedroom is the cupboard under the stairs (even though there is a spare bedroom). He’s treated like a stain on the carpet. His aunt and uncle tell him his parents died in a car crash. They keep him in rags, in his cousin’s hand-me-downs that are three times too big for him, and clothes that needed to be dyed to transform into his school uniform. His glasses are held together with tape, and for one birthday they give him ‘an old coat hanger’. He isn’t allowed to go anywhere with them - unless they absolutely have to take him, and for two weeks he was locked in that cupboard for things outside his control. He’s also bullied by his cousin - who he lives with - and not a single person steps in. Even the school doesn’t pick up on anything other than him being a troublemaker.
I don’t necessarily work with children, nor have we been graced with children of our own, but it doesn’t take a genius to know that a child in that position doesn’t just get hurt. No, they learn to believe what they’ve been told about themselves. In Harry’s case, that’s: he’s worth nothing, he’s a nuisance, and the people who should love him, don’t. For the first 11 years of Harry’s life, that belief is shaped by people who hate him.
Then, at 11, he finds out the truth. One: he’s a wizard, which is enough to send anyone doolally. Two: the family who raised him had been lying, and his parents were murdered by a wizard who’d turned bad. Three: he has a small fortune tucked away in a vault that will see him through.
His escape is real, but the fantasy is where it gets twisted. The only real emotion Harry shows towards the Dursleys in the rest of the series is hatred. There’s no fear of life based on a tortured belief system. There are no emotional or mental scars. And for all the trouble he gets into at Hogwarts, you’d think he expects to be punished and have to unlearn that he’s allowed to exist without earning it. Surely, right?
Harry makes friends with such ease that he can tell “the wrong kind of friends” for himself before he’s even been sorted into Gryffindor on his first day at Hogwarts. He has crushes on girls, though that may come a few years into his teens. But with no therapy? Wow, this boy is made of strong stuff! He’s well equipped to fly a broom from day one, too. He’s an honest boy with a good heart and a knack for finding the truth - for the greatest good.
And we can’t forget that, as the penultimate part of the series, he learns that not only did that dark wizard murder his parents, but he saw it. He remembers that he was there, he has nightmares about when it happened, and that same dark wizard who wanted to kill him that night? Well, he’s still out there, somewhere alive (ish), wanting to do a proper job next time. Can you imagine knowing this stuff?!
Now that last part may not have parallels to Dave Pelzer, but the earlier childhood stuff? Absolutely. To extremes that the human mind doesn’t even want to comprehend, Dave was abused by his alcoholic mother, who locked him in a cupboard, treated him as a slave, and he was given rags to wear - clothes that were torn and distressed. She eventually stripped his identity by referring to him as “It.” His father was passive throughout, and he wasn’t allowed to interact with his siblings. The only world that he knew was one of isolation and fear. A school nurse eventually intervened, and Social Services placed him in foster care at 12. His only way of surviving that entire chapter of his life was to dream of a loving family who wanted a son.
The Lost Boy is the follow-up memoir about that foster care system, following him through his teens, multiple foster homes, no real connections, and no real home. He describes resentment from people who believed foster kids were trouble and unworthy of being truly loved, just because they aren’t part of a “real” family. And as much as J.K. Rowling enabled Harry to feel Hogwarts was now his home, that only came at the end of his first year, (which should have been another trip to add to his book of nightmares).
The “Harry dreamt it all” theory
As I was writing this, I came across an Instagram AI carousel with a few alternate theories about the HP series. As I swiped left, one image caught my mind’s eye: Harry dreamt the whole magical world up as his coping fantasy. He was a lonely boy under the stairs, imagining a world where he’s special, and one where he dreams of someone to love him like a son.
It’s a metaphor, and it’s interesting.
It is know that children who are abused often build an inner world to survive. Harry’s fantasies about his parents, his wand, and a place where he belongs are the kind of thing a child in that situation might create. Whether or not Hogwarts is real, Harry’s hope in it was real, and it’s what got him through.
In either reality, was Dumbledore right to leave Harry with the Dursleys? On paper, maybe. He was famous before he even knew his own name, so it would be good for him to grow up away from all that. Plus there’s the safety of a blood-relative household, and protection from that dangerous dark wizard.
But what J.K. Rowling created is a life where Dumbledore was planning for a threat, not really for the child. The protection kept Voldemort away from Harry, but it said nothing about whether Harry would be fed, loved, safe from the brutality of other family members, or even told the truth about his life. We know Dumbledore had reason to suspect how the Dursleys felt about Harry, and he chose to leave him there anyway, even when questioned by the honourable Professor McGonagall.
So the question isn’t whether the plan worked, because Harry survived, and the protection kept him alive through years when Voldemort was hunting him. The question is: what did it cost, and who paid for it? In real life, it would be a boy who was locked in a cupboard, grew up believing he was worthless, and had a heck of a lot of trauma to process. But in fantasy? It was all sorted within the space of a year, with no therapy, just the discovery that his innate wizarding skill would have the Dursleys fearing him, and so treating him (reluctantly) with some leeway, but still not with an ounce of the human decency or love he needed.
Harry survived the Dursleys, but he didn’t thrive until he went to Hogwarts. He turned out brave, loyal and brilliant, and a lot of that was in spite of his childhood, not because of it.
Similarly, A Man Named Dave is the final book in the memoirs of Dave Pelzer. He’s grown, he’s wise, and he’s seen things most people in this world could never comprehend. Yet he goes on to forgive his mother, his father and his siblings, and that, my friends, is where the real key to healing lies. Not because we forgive people to make it easier on them, but to forgive them so we release the burden from ourselves.
