Albus Dumbledore, Hogwarts headmaster, has baby Harry deposited at the doorstep of 4 Privet Drive, where Petunia and Vernon Dursley, the Potters’ in-laws, live.
When I reread the book recently, though, I was most concerned with that backstory: One-year-old Harry miraculously survives when his parents, Lily and James, are murdered by Voldemort. I was more interested in details of the wizarding world, like Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans. It hardly registered to me that Harry was an orphan, though the first fifty or so pages of Sorcerer’s Stone are devoted to hashing out his backstory. But I remember finishing the book after dark, reading by the floodlight on the side of our house, which felt a world away from Hogwarts, where Harry, Ron, and Hermione were racing to find the Sorcerer’s Stone.
I must have stopped reading to eat-my parents wouldn’t have let me miss family dinner. Still, when I sat down at the picnic table in my backyard to read, I fell headlong into Harry’s magical coming-of-age tale, in which he learns that his deceased parents were wizards and grows into his new identity at Hogwarts. I didn’t usually read stories with male protagonists or fantasy elements-I was more of a Judy Blume girl (see: growing pains). Potter fever hadn’t struck my Long Island hometown yet, even though Sorcerer’s Stone had been released in the US a year earlier. I’m not sure why I chose to read Sorcerer’s Stone- the first in Rowling’s seven-book series-that summer. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, which turns twenty years old this month. It was a world I, and millions of other readers, never wanted to leave. I remember one of those books well, not because it felt relevant to my life as a ten-year-old girl experiencing literal growing pains, but because its world was so unlike my own. I began summer 1999 as I did most vacations: I went to the public library and checked out an armload of books.
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