What I’m Blogging

It’s the birthday of novelist John Irving, born in Exeter, New Hampshire (1942). His parents divorced by the time Irving was two years old. He never met his father and never learned anything about the man. He said, “The principal event of my childhood was that no adult in my family would tell me who my father was.” He fell in love with the novels of Charles Dickens in part because he identified with the stories about orphans.

…instead of making him happy, it made him miserable…

He made his name with his novel The World According to Garp (1978), about the fatherless son of a radical feminist. It was Irving’s fourth novel, and it went on to sell more than three million copies in six months. The success allowed Irving to quit his teaching job and devote the rest of his life to writing, but instead of making him happy, it made him miserable. He said, “The first thing I thought of when that novel made me famous, was, ‘Now [my father] will come find me. Now he’ll identify himself.’”

Irving finally learned the identity of his father in 1981, when his mother gave him a collection of letters she’d been hiding since World War II. Irving learned that his father had been a fighter pilot who was shot down over Burma, who walked to China, and was only rescued after being missing for forty days.

Irving used his father’s letters in his novel The Cider House Rules (1985). He hoped that somehow his father might read the book and see the letters. He said, “[It] was my way of saying, ‘If you’re out there, if you do read me, hello, I know something about you.’ But I never heard from him.”

In 2001 Irving had just started a new novel about an actor who goes looking for his lost father and finally finds him. That year, he gave an interview on television, and after the interview he got a phone call from a man claiming to be his half brother. It turned out that Irving’s father had died in 1996. Irving went on to finish the novel about a man searching for his father, called Until I Find You, which came out in 2005.

He’s disappointed that he never managed to meet the man, but Irving believes he might not have become a writer if his father hadn’t been absent. He said, “My imaginary reader has been my father. Surely, in one novel after another, I’ve been inventing fathers. I’ve been making them up. I have a ceaseless capacity to make up the missing part, to fill in the blanks, and he was a blank in my life.”