There’s the Oscar, and a photo of him with Salman Rushdie – another with Courtney Love – and endless images of men in singlets. A framed 1981 Time magazine image, where he’s sitting on the trunk of a car with a “GARP” vanity plate, has faded with age. But then, a blown-up Barneys New York fashion ad from the same decade, featuring him and his then-teenage sons, is as crisp as the day it was shot. In John Irving’s Toronto writing studio, every inch of wall space is filled with memories of the decades he’s spent writing, wrestling and raising a family. At the giant L-shaped desk, there’s a laptop and a few small stacks of books that include Moby-Dick, Great Expectations and The Diary of Anne Frank, all of which are bursting with multicoloured tabs. And there’s a copy of his own 2009 novel, The Last Night in Twisted River, which doesn’t have any tabs but it does have a great first line: “The young Canadian, who could not have been more than 15, had hesitated too long.”

Tucked in between the books is a CD of Canadian folk legends Ian & Sylvia.  “I love them,” Irving tells me during our tour of the room. “That’s my period of music.” It’s got him thinking about some of his other favourites. “It wasn’t that long ago that Paul Simon was in town,” he recalls. “We’re old friends, you know, old ’60s ratfuck political complainers. We went out to lunch a day or two before his show. And as we were saying goodbye, I knew I’d see him on stage, but I wouldn’t see him again privately. And it was a knee-jerk at the same time, we pointed at each other from across the room and we both said, ‘Still crazy after all these years.’” READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE…