Gilding the Lily

[Caius Marcius]

No: HPFGUIDX 20775

--- In HPforGrownups at y..., Magda Grantwich <mgrantwich at y...> wrote:
> > 3.) where are Lily's girlfriends?  and particularly, where's
> > Harry's godmother?  
> 
> I have another question: where's Lily?  We hear lots about James as 
a
> boy but it's inconceivable to me that Lily - who attended the same
> school in presumably the same years - is still a blank except for 
the
> colour of her eyes.
> 
> I really find it hard to believe that Harry has so little curiousity
> about his parents or that it was satisfied so easily with a book of
> wedding pics and a hand-me-down invisibility cloak.  JKR must be
> saving things up.

IIRC, JKR has said in interviews that we will start learning a great 
deal about Lily Potter in Book Five (and we will get a startling 
revelation about her in Book Seven). 

In "real-life" terms it makes little sense that a child whose 
greatest longing is to see his parents to have so little curiosity 
about them - But HP is fiction, not real-life, and most conform to 
narrative rules.  If Harry "wanted" to know all about his parents, he 
would have applied the same energy he used to unearth the identity of 
Nicholas Flamel - but JKR must withhold certain information from 
Harry (and therefore from the reader) to make the narrative more 
suspenseful and interesting.

Prisoner of Azkaban would have been much less interesting if we had 
learned all about the Marauder's Map in Book 1.

     - CMC

A glass of peel and pip for Mr. Potter of Texas, please.

    - Finnegans Wake, p. 274