HARRY POTTER is a “very angry” teenager who has his first relationship with a girl in the new book, the author J. K. Rowling says in an interview with The Times.

Her fans have waited three long years for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which is 766 pages long and goes on sale at midnight tonight. In the interview, she talks frankly about fame and the wealth that she has gained through the books.

“Fame is a very odd and very isolating experience,” she says, “and I know some people crave it. A lot of people crave it. I find that very hard to understand.”

Rowling says she was so exhausted after the last book that she had to take a break. “I wasn’t coping. I wasn’t coping at all,” she says. She also reveals that she tried to give back the advance on an earlier book. To escape the pressure, she wrote a novel which was left unfinished when she finally started work on the new “Harry” book in 2001.

Rowling, once a poverty-stricken single mother who is now worth an estimated £280 million, says that her wealth makes her feel guilty.

“This came to me through doing the thing that I love doing most. So I suppose I feel that I haven’t suffered enough pain for it.” She adds that she is “not writing for the money” but for herself and her fans and says that married life with her new husband, Dr Neil Murray, has made her much happier and calmer.

On the night they met, he told her that he had read only ten pages of her first book, while on a late-night shift at hospital. “I thought that was fantastic,” she says in the interview which took place at her Edinburgh home. Their baby, David, was born in March. Rowling also has a daughter, Jessica, from an earlier marriage.

Harry, who is now 15, has some excruciatingly embarrassing scenes in the new book. “He is very much in puberty,” she says. “I just think it is a very confusing time. Yes, he’s very confused in a boy way. He doesn’t understand how girls’ minds work.”

Apparently, though, Hermione has no shortage of advice for him on that subject. Rowling adds: “Harry, for the first time, does have a relationship of sorts. The emphasis is very much on ‘of sorts’ . . . That was really fun to write actually. I thinkyou will find it painful. You should find it painful. It is painful but it was such fun to write. Poor Harry! What I put him through.”

She cried twice while writing the fourth book and once during this last one because there is a “nasty death” in it. “It is someone whom I consider to be a main character,” she says.

The book is “a bit of a departure” from the others. “Harry is very angry. Very angry. And he’s angry for most of the book. But I think that is fair enough. Given what has happened to him and that he hasn’t been given an awful lot of information. So I think he would be very angry. So it’s not a very gentle tale.”

Rowling reveals that she has already started writing book six in the series but that, for the first time, she feels free from the pressure to deliver.

“I am in a very lovely position. Contractually, I don’t even have to write any more books at all. So no one can possibly write that I have missed a deadline because I actually don’t have a contractual deadline for six and seven.”

She always knew that Harry and his friends growing up would present a challenge.

“This was going to be a tricky balancing act. I always wanted them to grow up. I have a real problem when they just remain static. I find it creepy. So, ostensibly they are 16 years old but they are never allowed a hormonal impulse or to feel any adolescent agony. At the same time, Harry Potter books are concerned with other things than sex and drugs and teenage pregnancies. So it is a balancing act. Because you want to make it realistic without going off-track stylistically or tonally.”

The books have been getting longer. She says book six will be shorter but predicts that seven will be “massive” — if she can ever bring herself to finish the series she loves.

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