Hello, I'm Emma Barnett. For most of my career, I've been on live radio and I love it.

But I've always wondered, what if we'd had more time? How much deeper does the story go?

I remember having this very sharp thought that what you do right now, this is it. This defines your life.

I'm ready to talk and ready to listen.

I'm insulted by how little the medical community is ever bothered with this.

Ready to talk with me, Emma Barnard, is my new podcast. Listen on BBC Sounds.

A successful wrestler and a celebrated novelist, a writer whose influences are Charles

Dickens and Federico Fellini, a US citizen who may have lived in Canada for 30 years,

but whose voice still angers when talking about Richard Nixon. My guest this evening

in extended conversation is John Irving, author of the celebrated

The World According to Garp and the Cider House rules amongst many other fictions,

which now include his new novel, Avenue of Mysteries.

Several have been made into movies, as he calls them.

John Irving was born in 1942 into Protestant New Hampshire, was mentored by

Kurt Vonnegut and came to fame in the 70s with Garp and other novels whose landscapes are

often populated by orphaned or abandoned children, by circuses, sexual outsiders, by concern

with abortion and AIDS, by a promiscuous sense of place,

and a complex response to Catholicism.

In the world according to Garp, the child is the illegitimate son of a feminist who founds a centre for transsexuals.

Garp himself grows up to be a novelist, fascinated by wrestling,

scared for the safety of his own children.

As I said, Dickens meets Fellini.

...