John Irving

At 80, the author of "The World According to Garp" and so much more talks about his longest and Irving-est book yet, "The Last Chairlift."

I took the role of being a teacher and a coach to heart. I can’t think of a better way to exit. But I can count the boxcars and I can count the number of major characters. I just was frustrated that I could only find the time to write for two hours a day and not every day. And I’m more — at least I feel I’m more — relaxed telling a story. To declare that an undeveloped fetus has more rights than a fully grown and fully developed woman. I’m familiar with what I do best as a writer, more familiar than I used to be. Because you ought to know — you ought to listen to what it is you do that irritates some people. I’m sure the sheer size of this thing is going to turn some people away. For some time now, I’ve thought of my unwritten novels as boxcars in a train station not yet coupled to an engine. Within a hundred pages, I was weeping, snapped out of my fog. Bumbling around a hostel lobby I picked up, almost at random, a paperback copy of John Irving’s 1998 novel “