In the mid 1980s, I was a teenager, discovering that my mother and I actually have weirdly overlapping tastes (weird because she’s all about literary fiction and the depressing Russians, and I’m all about genre fiction and funky Latin Americans). But there is some overlap, and for a year or so, it fell square on the shoulders of John Irving.
Which, when I think back on it, isn’t all that surprising. He’s depressing and literary and slightly funky and pushed social borders, and occasionally dipped his toes into the out-and-out Weird.
And wow, did he piss me off.