Guardian News and Media/London

J K Rowling has spoken of her sadness that her mother, who died from complications related to multiple sclerosis at the age of 45, never knew about the success of her Harry Potter novels.
As guest editor of Monday morning’s edition of Woman’s Hour - the first time in nearly 60 years that the BBC Radio 4 show has had a guest editor - the bestselling author chose MS as one of her topics.
Her mother died after suffering an aggressive form of the disease nearly 15 years ago; her death was an “enormous shock”, said Rowling, as her mother “always seemed very young”.
“She was very fit, she was a non-smoker, non-drinker, and I say all of this because of course then for her to be diagnosed at 35 with an illness that would kill her was just the most enormous shock to us and everyone who knew her,” said Rowling, who has helped to fund the Anne Rowling Regenerative Neurology Clinic, part of the University of Edinburgh, in her mother’s memory.
The author was a teenager at the time of her mother’s diagnosis, and said the news “had the most enormous impact on our family life”. “My mother, by the time she was diagnosed, she was quite ill. She had been showing symptoms for a few years and didn’t know what they were, so by the time she was diagnosed, her health was deteriorating, so it wasn’t just the spectre of the unknown, it was dealing with the daily reality of somebody who’s starting not to be able to walk as well as they had, and for such an active person that was a real privation,” she said.
Rowling said she wished her mother had known about the success of her Harry Potter books. “My mother was a passionate reader, and she would have been excited whatever I did, if I succeeded at anything, but particularly to be a writer, she would have considered to be a very valuable thing,” she said. But “she never knew about Harry Potter. I started writing it six months before she died, so that is painful. I wish she’d known.”
The author also spoke of her charity work, saying she wanted to “use my power for good not evil”, choosing as another topic the millions of children around the world who live in institutions, and the work her charity Lumos does to help them. “I remember being introduced to a group of three-year-olds who swarmed all over me. They just gravitated to anyone who would show them affection. I had one little girl sitting on my lap and just clinging to me and she’d just been introduced to me,” said Rowling of her own experience of institutionalised children, getting “quite emotional” as she spoke.