Rowling described how, seven years after her own graduation, she had failed on an epic scale — a collapsed marriage, jobless, a single parent, as poor as possible in modern Britain without being homeless. She told the Harvard graduates she would not pretend failure was fun: it was a dark period with no fairy tale in sight. But failure freed her. With her greatest fear realized and nothing left to lose, she had an old typewriter and a big idea, and she channeled everything into writing Harry Potter.