The Water Method Man rules. Someday we should have a fall F2F and celebrate Throgsgaffen (sp?). And Setting Free the Bears is also glorious. As are Cider House, Garp and Owen Meany. I don't think I could read HNH again due to a bone-deep incest squick, but I'm not at all sorry I read it the once (so much good writing all around the squick, and I might never have found Donald Justice's poetry without it). And the nonfiction collection, Trying to Save Piggy Sneed, is fantastic.

I've read them all, and though Hotel New Hampshire was my favorite, until Widow for One Year, which I just fell in love with.

However, Until I Find you creeped me out beyond belief with the young boy having sex with the teenage girl. Somehow, I was OK with the incest, but that just seemed really self indulgent and gross. I think perhaps because somehow the young boy was really good at sex (supposedly). It could be my age, however, but I feel like the boy in Until I Found you was way younger than the Hotel New Hamphire guy.

Wasn't Until I Find You based on Irving's own experience of sexual abuse as a child?

It felt that way, actually, but it also felt that he was protecting himself by being "good" and having prowess. It just really, I think, felt to personal?

ETA: or maybe defensive-- as if it wasn't abuse because what kid wouldn't want an older lover. But it felt like abuse to me immediately. So maybe it did what he intended...

It just really, I think, felt to personal?

Curious. He wrote the whole novel in the third person, wasn't satisfied with it, and then rewrote the whole thing in the first person.

I think Irving's coming to terms with it. Garp also had an early sexual initiation. And you'll remember that Jenny Garp had nonconsensual sex with Garp's father (he was brain damaged in her ward, and she mounted him when he had an erection). Garp himself has all the babysitter sex. I think there's definitely a recurring theme with problematic sexual boundaries.

Which, now that I think of it, may be the source of his interest in prostitutes. Because that has very clear boundaries.

That makes sense- somehow Until I Found you was the first time I found the sexual boundries made me feel all "Danger Will Robinson!" and I felt a little like the book didn't want me to feel that way.. but it as probably the character that didn't want to feel that way.

Interesting factiod: My acting teacher in college babysat for John Irving's children while she was in college. I do not know if she was THE babysitter...

A Prayer For Owen Meany is my favourite Irving and one of my favourite books, period. I love the way it all came together so neatly in the end.

ita, ITA.

(I think that's the first time I've done that. I just had to.)

The whole book, I frequently became impatient whenever the book started to meander for pages and pages on unimportant digressions and events, but at the end, I realized how everything really had been important, and it had all been leading up to the finale, and it was awesome.

It's interesting to me (not just in this discussion, I've seen it elsewhere) that Owen Meany is so resonant for so many people.

For somebody who read Irving from his early books, it's oddly like watching Rebecca Lizard discover R.E.M. through their 7th album.

Then again some Tom Waits fans might feel that about people that joined in around Swordfishtrombones (his 8th).