Garp, Forty Years Later

According to my Goodreads page, the first time I read The World According to Garp, by John Irving, was after my first year of college. I had thought, mistakenly, that I’d first read it in high school, but regardless, it had made an impression on me. It was my first exposure to an openly trans character and an openly asexual and aromantic character in fiction, the first book I read that explicitly discussed feminism and confronted toxic masculinity head on (though it didn’t call it that and, in my first reading, I didn’t, either). In rereading the novel recently, I wasn’t surprised that these themes had struck me so deeply, though Garp is about so much else as well.

In his new foreword to the fortieth-anniversary edition of the book, Irving writes that back in 1977, he thought the novel was about “the polarization of the sexesin manuscript form, the boy saw the book completely differently. He told his father that it’s “about the fear of death … Maybe, more accurately, the fear of the death of children—or of anyone you love.” With that reading, it makes sense that my memory tricked me into thinking I first read in high school: my father and his mother both died when I was sixteen, several months apart.