By Amanda Knox
 
I’m actually glad Chris was just too old to be into Harry Potter back in the day. Although he was a fantasy and sci-fi nerd who read voraciously and regularly played Dungeons and Dragons, in 1997—when Sorcerer’s Stone was published—he was also fifteen. There were limits.
 
I, on the other hand, was the perfect age—ten. Thanks to the fact that my mom was an elementary school teacher who stayed apace of children’s literature, I received a U.S. first edition copy for my birthday just a month after it was published, and straight away, I read it all the way through. For the release of every book in the series since, I made a point of standing hours in line at Barnes and Noble, dressed in a hand-made purple cloak, waiting for midnight to strike so I could purchase my copy and stay up all night reading. I matured alongside the books. They made me laugh, cry, think. I returned to them again and again, read them in German and Italian. I even studied the supplemental material—Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Quidditch Through the Ages—and I gratefully absorbed Eliezer Yudkowsky’s epic fanfiction, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
 
Now I get to return to them again, this time with special purpose: Chris. We’re listening to the audiobooks in the car, while eating meals, before going to bed. I’m enjoying witnessing the dichotomous way he approaches the story: on the one hand, with a certain adult detachment as the writer in him takes note of narrative cues (“Snape’s looking pretty suspicious… Too suspicious to be the real bad guy... But what about that Gilderoy Lockhart?!”). On the other hand, he’s boyish and emotionally invested, clenching his fists and muttering darkly whenever Draco Malfoy enters the scene. I love that he can be both—adult and child—at the same time.
 
For my part, I get to enjoy omniscience—I’m always raising my eyebrows suggestively, gleefully squeezing Chris’s hand, and smirking knowingly. But even more than that, coming back to the series as an adult after already absorbing it as a child, I’m enjoying understanding aspects of the story that I overlooked before, simply because I didn’t yet have the requisite life experience to appreciate them.
 
Take The Prisoner of Azkaban, which Chris and I just finished. There’s political intrigue, betrayal, heartbreak…and on top of all that, Dementors:

Dementors…drain peace, hope, and happiness out of the air around them. Even Muggles feel their presence, though they can’t see them. Get too near a Dementor and every good feeling, every happy memory will be sucked out of you…You’ll be left with nothing but the worst experiences of your life.*

Back when I was a kid, I didn’t really understand the Dementors beyond that they were terrifying monsters that can drain the magic out of wizards. It never occurred to me that what a Dementor did to people in the world dreamed up by J.K. Rowling could have anything to do with what people experience in the real world, like it never occurred to me how to relate to a werewolf.

Only since having lived a bit more do I recognize that Dementors are a magical manifestation of something very real and relatable—depression. Get too close to a Dementor, and you’ll be trapped in a cold, sad loop of panic and hopelessness, haunted by your worst life experiences and fears. Everyone feels that now and again; I felt that for the better portion of a day just last week. What I love about J.K. Rowling’s metaphor for depression—a soul-sucking monster—is how it accurately reflects a person’s ability to unwillingly but unavoidably obsess over our worst fears and memories, and lose sight of a better, more balanced perspective.
 
Just today, Chris and I went to see Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, in which J.K. Rowling introduces a whole new monster: the Obscurus. It’s a magical parasite that forms in a young witch or wizard when they are forced to suppress their magical powers, especially under traumatic circumstances. The Obscurus eventually takes over its host, dissolving them into a cloud of silky, black ash that lashes out and destroys anything in its path. Like the Dementor, the Obscurus is not just a monster. It is a magical manifestation of the kind of dissociative and aggressive mental illness that a person can suffer as a result of abuse, neglect, and self-repression.
 
Yes! As terribly tragic as the Obscurus is, it’s real. It means something. This is the take-away of the series, as I return to it again and again: Harry Potter is rooted in a deep, searching compassion for the human condition. And that’s a story I’ll never get tired of, especially if the world happens to be inhabited by Nibblers, Phoenixes, and the Weasley twins. On the drive home, we put on Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
 
* J.K. Rowling. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Scholastic 1999.