While taking part in the BBC genealogy series Who Do You Think You Are?, JK Rowling, author of the mega famous Harry Potter books, discovered she comes from a long line of single mums.
It was only during the research for the program, which uncovers the family tree of celebrities, that Rowling learned that her great-grandmother, Lizzie, her great-great-grandmother, Salomé, and her great-great-great-grandmother, Christine were all single mothers. Her maternal grandmother, Louisa, was also supposedly born out of wedlock.
Although she's said to be worth half a billion pounds, Rowling famously wrote the first Potter book in the midst of divorce proceedings. She was living on welfare in a cold Edinburgh flat with her baby daughter -- an experience that, perhaps not surprisingly, left her clinically depressed.
"Between 1993 and 1997," said Rowling, "I did the job of two parents, qualified and then worked as a secondary school teacher, wrote one and a half novels and did the planning for a further five. For a while, I was clinically depressed. To be told, over and over again, that I was feckless, lazy — even immoral — did not help."
A teary Rowling, who married her second husband, Neil Murray, a doctor, in 2001, described taking part in the genealogy series as "humbling" and "strangely reassuring”.
Rowling has previously stated that being a single mother had made her a scourge of the previous Conservative government.
"Women like me... were, according to popular myth, a prime cause of social breakdown and in it for all we could get: free money, state-funded accommodation, an easy life."
Au contraire, Rowling is not only president of Gingerbread, a UK charity for single parents, she is a modern-day heroine worthy of her own fairy tale.
Printer-friendly version