1. Rita’s earliest memory is of eating a banana. She remembers the colour vividly, the peeling, the sweet creamy taste. She can’t have been much older than two. Born in 1951, she’s too young to have experienced the worst of post World War II rationing, but she knows now that restrictions on bananas ended last of all. Her childhood memories are full of her mother saying no, of hiding food away, of refusing to buy the dresses with the frills and bows. Those memories have only made her more extravagant.

2. She met Bellatrix Black on the Hogwarts Express. She’d seen her on the train platform, all black hair and head held high, wearing perfect new robes, and wanted to be her. Covering her own muggle gear hastily with the robe she’d been fitted for, she’d managed to seat herself in the same compartment. After Bella’s first three mentions of ‘filthy muggle scum’, Rita invented a wizard relative from France. When they were sorted into different houses, Rita didn’t think they’d ever get to be friends, but her desire to be like Bellatrix never really went away.

3. Just before her thirtieth birthday, Rita found out she was pregnant. She’d slept with a high-ranking Ministry official with well-known Deatheater sympathies. With Voldemort on the rampage and the blood of the child hers, there was no question but to get rid of it. A few months later, the Dark Lord was defeated by year-old Harry Potter and the world became less frightening overnight. Rita thinks it was probably a good thing - she’s about the least maternal woman who ever lived - but every now and then (like when she watched little second years running up and down the halls of Hogwarts during the triwizard tournament) she wonders who the child could have been.

4. Rita’s main issue with Albus Dumbledore, even before writing the biography, was his hypocrisy. She’d always thought his quiet campaign for the rights of muggleborns and halfbreeds admirable, but she despised his lack of protest against the idea that all Slytherins were muggle-haters, blood-purists and Deatheaters. She’s never seen how labelling people those things before they even opened their mouths would help prevent them from becoming so.

5. She hates censorship. People have always presumed that because she writes gossip, she doesn’t really care what restrictions the Ministry have put on the press’ freedoms, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Gossip, she thinks, can be every bit as damaging as fact, and is a powerful tool in bringing down people who deserve it. And Ministry censorship has never done anything but get in the way of the various arrangements she’s had with people about what to write.

6. Rita loves to walk almost as much as she loves to fly (with wings, of course - she’s hopeless on a broomstick). Over the years, she’s made a point of walking to and from work every day, a habit she wasn’t game to break in the last year, thinking changes in her behaviour might make people suspicious. Every day since the Muggleborn Register was created, the walk felt like death. One morning she was approached by a woman with three children under ten, and asked for a spare galleon. The woman’s husband had been Kissed right in front of her for making a fuss at his trial, and now she needed money to pay someone to watch the children while she worked at the Ministry to put food on the table. Rita parted with the money, but didn’t go to work that day. Instead she spent it curled in a ball on her couch, stripped naked to rid herself of all her Things, trying to freeze, trying to starve, trying to imagine herself in a cell at Azkaban to rid herself of the guilt that came from being warm and safe.

7. She loves vegetables. Like her obsession with pretty lights and shiny things, this is probably a beetle thing. Sometimes, she’ll subsist for days on nothing but salads, or celery and cucumber sticks with cream cheese. When she does eat meat, she tends to stick to fish and chicken. Occasionally, she’ll eat red meat, but not often.

8. She doesn’t own a pair of trousers. For Rita, it’s always skirts, stockings and heels. She’s a woman, and she wants to feel like one every moment of the day. Her getting-ready rituals are very important to her. She always wears her best underwear. She loves the feel of satin against her skin, and couldn’t bear to have chipped nails or windblown hair. Whenever she passes a mirror, she can’t help but glance at herself and admire her own reflection.

9. In her third year, Rita met Moaning Myrtle. In a long library session with one of the Gryffindor fourth years who needed help with his transfiguration homework, Rita had unthinkingly mentioned her parents’ occupations without the benefit of the ‘but Mum only chose to give up magic when she married Dad - she’s related to the Dubois family.’ Gryffindors didn’t care about that sort of thing, after all. Two days later, she’d been teased mercilessly for being a ‘bookish little mudblood’ and she’d taken off to one of the bathrooms to claw angry tears from her eyes. Myrtle had popped out of the faucet, all sympathy, and taken a liking to her fellow bespectacled Ravenclaw, saying they were just like each other. The following day, Rita started a vicious rumour about the Gryffindor boy and transfigured herself a more fashionable pair of frames. She never cried in a Hogwarts bathroom again.

10. These days, no matter what she writes or who she tears apart with words, she tells herself she is nothing like Bellatrix Black.