John Irving’s memoir begins with his account of the distinguished career and medical writings of the novelist’s grandfather Dr Frederick C. Irving,a renowned obstetrician and gynaecologist, and includes Mr Irving’s incisive history of abortion politics in the United States. But My Movie Business focuses primarily on the thirteen years John Irving spent adapting his novel The Cider House Rules for the screen - for four different directors. The movie was nominated for seven Oscars,winning two - for Best Adapted Screenplay for John Irving and Best Supporting Actor for Michael Caine.

Mr Irving also writes about the failed effort to make his first novel,Setting Free the Bears, into a movie; about two of the films thatwere made from his novels(but not from his screenplays), The World According to Garp and The Hotel New Hampshire; about his slow progress at shepherding his screenplay of A Son of the Circus into production.

John Irving was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1942, and he once admitted that he was a ’grim’ child. Although he excelled in English at school and knew by the time he graduated that he wanted to write novels, it was not until he met a young Southern novelist named John Yount, at the University of New Hampshire, that he received encouragement. ’It was so simple,’ he remembers. ’Yount was the first person to point out that anything I did except writing was going to be vaguely unsatisfying.’

In 1963, Irving enrolled at the Institute of European Studies in Vienna,and he later worked as a university lecturer. His first novel, Setting Free the Bears, about a plot to release all the animals from the Vienna Zoo, was followed by The Water-Method Man, a comic tale of a man with a urinary complaint, and The 158-Pound Marriage, which exposes the complications of spouse-swapping. Irving achieved international recognition with The World According to Garp, which he hoped would ’cause a few smiles among the tough-minded and break a few softer hearts’.

The Hotel New Hampshire is a startlingly original family saga, and The Cider House Rules is the story of Doctor Wilbur Larch - saint,obstetrician, founder of an orphanage, ether addict and abortionist and of his favourite orphan, Homer Wells, who is never adopted. A Prayer for Owen Meany features the most unforgettable character Irving has yet created. A Son of the Circus is an extraordinary evocation of modern day India. John Irving’s latest and most ambitious novels are A Widow for One Year and The Fourth Hand.A collection of John Iving’s shorter writing, Trying to Save Piggy Sneed, was published in 1993. Irving has also written the screenplays for The Cider House Rules and A Son of the Circus, and wrote about his experiences in the world of movies in his memoir My Movie Business.

Irving has had a life-long passion for wrestling, and he plays a wrestling referee in the film of The World According to Garp. In his memoir, The Imaginary Girlfriend, John Irving writes about his life as a wrestler, a novelist and as a wrestling coach. He now writes fulltime, has three children and lives in Vermont and Toronto.

1 Mrs Berkeley’s Constipation

2 The Ether Addict

3 Rubber Gloves

4 Not Quite Awake

5 The Great God Irving

6 To Be of Use

7 Paying the Piper

8 But Could It Really Be Taught to a Chimpanzee?

9 The Disintegrating Uterus

10 The Bleak Version

11 No Escargot

12 First Haircut

13 The Motorcycle I Gave Away

14 Not Completely Healed

15 Not Wang, Not Winterbottom

16 Losing Wally, Keeping Candy

17 A Terse Speculation on the Movie Poster

18 Alone at Their Table

19 The Disapproving Stationmaster

20 Fuzzy

21 Lost Scenes

22 The Twelve-Year-Old Girl

23 Fade to Black