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You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal

Who can think, who can reason, who can read

Hello and welcome to Bookworm

This is Michael Silverblatt

It's my pleasure today to be talking to John Irving

The author most recently of a widow for one year.

I will go through the list in order. His first novel was setting Free the Bears, followed by the

Water Method Man, the 158-pound marriage, the world according to Garp, the Hotel New Hampshire,

a cider house rules, a prayer for Owen Meaney, a son of the circus,

the collection trying to save Piggy Sneed, and now a widow for one year from Random House.

Now this seems to me to be the apotheosis of your love for the big, well-potted novel.

And could you express that affection to begin with?

Yes, I think it's the best built, speaking as the builder, speaking as the architect.

I think it's the best made of the last four books, each one of which I think is itself better made than any of the first five. But a widow for one year came with a structure that was more precise than any structure I've had in a novel ever.

The structure is simply being almost out of a play.

It's a book in three acts from three different periods of time in a woman's

life, chosen deliberately to be the three most difficult periods of this woman's life. The summer,

she's four years old and her mother leaves, and she doesn't see her mother again for 37 years.

The fall, many years later, when she's a 36-year-old, successful novelist, but entirely less

...