John Irving's runaway bestselling novel, The World According to Garp, published in 1978 and made into a 1982 film starring Robin Williams, is famous for many reasons, particularly its ahead-of-its-time ideas about gender and sexuality.
In Irving's fifteenth and latest novel, the whopping 900-some-page ‘The Last Chairlift,’ there is again a straight male writer raised by a single mother, violence against a public advocate of minority rights, and a core trans character. The new book is deliberately engaged in how society can run roughshod over queer and trans people, and how shrugging off the labels and barriers placed on us by society can make us more ourselves, and more at home in the world.
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