Both she and Garp are befriended by a wonderful trans woman named Roberta Muldoon, who remains the family’s staunch friend long after both Garp and Jenny are murdered. Jenny Fields, meanwhile, retires from nursing and takes in women who need shelter at her large inherited home. Garp stays home and cooks, cleans, and takes care of their children. Garp marries his childhood friend, Helen, after he proves to her that he can write a good story (theirs is first a marriage of the minds and only later one of love and lust). Garp grows up to become a writer, though he is always in Jenny’s shadow: she writes a best-selling autobiography called A Sexual Suspect, which makes her a feminist icon. Garp, in the infirmary annex of a large and fancy private school for boys.

She impregnates herself by raping a dying soldier (he is severely brain-damaged and cannot consent). 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 Garp in high school: my father and his mother both died when I was sixteen, several months apart.Ī brief summary, for those who don’t have the book seared in their minds: the novel begins with a morally questionable nurse, Jenny Fields, who doesn’t want a husband or boyfriend or to have sex with anyone at all, but does want a child. Look at the plot: a remarkable, albeit outspoken woman (Garp’s mother, Jenny Fields) is killed by a lunatic male who hates women Garp himself is assassinated by a lunatic female who hates men.” But when Irving asked his then-twelve-year-old son, Colin, to read Garp in manuscript form, the boy saw the book completely differently. 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 sexes … the story was about men and women growing further apart. 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.

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). I had thought, mistakenly, that I’d first read it in high school, but regardless, it had made an impression on me. 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.

Novel the world according to garp