J.K. Rowling is a graduate of Exeter University and was raised in a middle-class household. But when the world’s most famous children’s author wrote the first Harry Potter book, she was a single mother living on state benefits in a rented Edinburgh tenement flat. When she returned to the flat in 2007 to film a documentary, she burst into tears. “It was my life, and it was very hard, and I didn’t know there was going to be this fairy-tale resolution. This room is full of ghosts,” she told filmmakers.