If she is just bursting to tell this stuff, why doesn't she write? Heck, Robert B. Parker is still turning out stories about Spenser and Hawk. Besides, she's the only source of foreign income for all of Great Britain now. Without her writing, nobody's going to buy anything from there and the country will starve.

But all the teachers at Hogwarts were bachelors & spinsters, like Oxbridge dons before the 1870s.

Ms. Traister wrote well, but didn't convince me. I wonder if Ms. Traister's unease is Ms. Rowling doing the equivalent of painting beyond the frame, which doesn't blur the line between make-believe and reality, as an artist might intend, but rather reminds us that what's in the frame is make-believe. For example, if one were to paint a woman in a field that was contained in a frame, those borders facilitate our projecting into the frame, but if an artist were to paint a woman in a field stepping out into our world, by way of the frame, we would only see the gimmick.

Likewise with Ms. Rowling pulls back the curtain with her terrier teeth and shows us that her Wizard is powered by a woman on a stage wondering aloud, it is harder to pretend that Harry and company are real.

My guess is that Rowling didn't load every book with every detail she imagined because she, and perhaps her professional compatriots at the publishing company, understood that just because you may know all the details doesn't mean that all the details belong in the narrative.

However, it would be strange for her to release the equivalent of a "Special Edition" DVD containing all the deleted scenes from her own imagination. So instead, she offers this information--and this is key--when she is asked.

It is nice that Ms. Traister would like to retain her own visions of the stories Rowling spun, but not every reader is content with their own imagination, especially when Rowling's has proven so fertile. I presume that Rowling would consider it unfriendly, when asked a question like "Did Dumbledore ever find love?" to either lie about the backstory she'd created or to simply offer up a terse "No comment. Next question."

There's plenty already being complained about on this subject, and not just from the usual firebranded right-wing doomsayers. Some are annoyed that Rowling wasn't bold enough to announce Dumbledore's sexuality within the books themselves (because Dumbledore's sexuality played such an important part in his being the most powerful wizard in the world) or that Dumbledore was too old and unthreatening a character to have been the one she considered gay. In the midst of the many petty squabbles surrounding this revelation, sorry, but Ms. Traister's seems among the pettiest of all.

...would keep their mouth shut. All the greatest artists did exactly that, because they understood the necessity of ambiguity, and of mystery.

Frankly, I wish Tolkien had kept his yap shut and his pen quiet after he finished The Lord of the Rings.

I can't read Rowling's stuff. It's a prose style so deadly that her popularity really is a total mystery to me...but, what the hell do I know? Chacun a son gout, as they say.

Rowling is clear from the moment Harry spots a photo of

That's now gay? Traister you're a sicko.

CCTVs are going up faster than Starbucks and yet we are analyzing a pop writer's gay character? Perhaps, salon could use this time to accurately write about ALL of the candidates records instead of the one that is a closet NEOCON- hint rhymes with billary. Hey, while your at it perhaps you could write about the dollars crash or what politicians have been responsible for allowing people to get swindled by adjustable rate mortgages.

Am I asking too much?

Thanks, Ms. Traister, for a dead-on analysis of Rowling's strange lapse in judgment. Thanks also for pointing out the textual hints about Dumbledore. I overlooked them because (1)I was reading the final book mainly to know what side Snape was on and (2)I thought I remembered a mention in a previous book of Dumbledore having fathered a son, so it never occurred to me to wonder if the matter was more complex than that.

When I first read of what Rowling had done, it struck me as a rather silly mirror image of the flap over Murphy Brown some years ago. I thought, "But Dumbledore is fictional, and the book has already been written. What in the world is Rowling thinking?"

I understand now that she must be piqued that readers didn't take her hints and missed a subtle point, but she would deserve our respect much more if she respected her readers enough to let them gradually discover some things for themselves--particularly since she must know that many of her readers will return to the Potter books over and over and then eventually read them to, or with, their kids. Your comments are exactly right, and Rowling really needs to button it. I could cheerfully watch an episode a night of "Upstairs Downstairs" if they had kept making them. But I wouldn't care to read a steady stream of post mortem comments from Jean Marsh telling me about Mrs. Bridges' repressed longings for Ruby.

I think his point applies here too:

Neil --

In Ross Douthat's recent column in the Atlantic Monthly concerning the J.K. Rowling press of late (http://tinyurl.com/yq2wz2), Douthat suggests that "a writer confident in her powers wouldn't feel the need to announce details like this". It seems odd to me that ulterior motives are so quickly suspected -- she was an author answering a question with additional information not previously known. Do you find yourself withholding information during Q&A if it's not already contained in the story? Why or why not?

All that tells us is that Ross Douthat doesn't write fiction.

You always wind up knowing more about your characters than you can get onto the page. Pages are finite, and the story isn't about giving you all the information about everyone in it any more than life is. Things the author knows about characters (or at least, strongly suspects -- it's never really real until it hits the page, because the process of writing is also a process of discovery) that don't make it onto the page could include the characters' backstory, what they like to eat, the toothpaste they use, what happens to them after the story is over or before it began, and what they do in bed. That something didn't turn up in the books just means it didn't make it onto the page or wasn't relevant to the story. (Or even, it made it in and the author cut that scene out because it didn't work. One of my favourite scenes in Anansi Boys went because it made the chapter work better when it was gone.)

(I remember being astonished when I learned a few years ago, from an obituary, that two teachers I'd had as a child were a same-sex couple. Mostly astonished because at the age where they taught me, I didn't imagine that teachers had romantic lives, or were even entirely human; and learning that they were a pair reconfigured everything I knew about them, which wasn't very much.)

Neverwhere has two gay characters who are Out, as far as the book is concerned, and one major character who is gay but it isn't mentioned, simply because that character was one of many people in that book who don't have any sexual or romantic entanglements during the story. So it's irrelevant.

Sometimes even the author doesn't know for sure. (I used to wonder about Lucien the Librarian in Sandman. On the one hand, I strongly suspected he was gay; on the other, he seemed to have a small unrequited thing for Nuala going on. And if it had ever mattered in a story, I would have found out for certain, but it never did, so I didn't.)

And, truth to tell, sexuality tends to be such a minor thing, if you have several hundred characters running around in your head. You know more than you've written. One of the characters in Wall in Stardust, for example, is not what he is pretending to be in a way that has nothing at all to do with sex, although the clues are all there in the book, but if I don't do another story set in Wall you'll never find out who he is, or even why he's interesting.

As for withholding information... before the Internet, I'd tell anyone anything they wanted to know. ("Who's the missing member of the Endless?" "Destruction." "Oh.") After the Internet, I would try and avoid answering some direct questions because it might spoil things for people. "Why did Delight become Delirium?" "Who's the Forgotten God?" -- they're questions I would happily have answered for anyone who asked at a signing 20 years ago, because it wouldn't have gone any further, not in any way that mattered. Not any longer, because one day I may tell those stories. (If I knew for sure I wouldn't tell them, then I'd happily answer people now.)

http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/