This is an area that you have explored, you have written about. I think Roberta Muldoon in 'Garp' is the first really flesh-and-blood trans character I can recall reading about. It's still shorter than 'David Copperfield,' barely. I did not know it would be the longest, longer than 'Bleak House.' If someone told me when I read 'Bleak House' that I was going to write a longer novel than 'Bleak House'. A lot of consideration went into the order of the trains I've chosen, and I knew this would be long. For some years now, I think of the novels of mine that are waiting to be written as boxcars in a train station, not yet coupled to an engine. We are living in an age, a digital age, short attention span, things that are evanescent and then disappear.

The books seem as big as concrete blocks. SIMON: We sat at a large round table piled high with copies of John Irving's new book, 'The Last Chairlift.' The story takes Adam Brewster, who's a novelist and screenwriter, from infancy to old age - his father, unknown for most of the book, his mother, a ski instructor who's away most of the time, his stepfather, an English teacher who transitions to female and whom Adam adores and worries about.

I met him when he was a soldier and I was an infant.

Front row, center is my biological father, who I have no memory of meeting. SIMON: And the one above it, people in the - it looks like Air Force. IRVING: That is my daughter Eva, who I'm sure we'll talk about. Family photos fill the walls there, and any fan of John Irving's novels will find similarities between his characters and the stories in those photos - a little boy who didn't know his father, New England prep schools, wrestling tournaments and the families we assemble. SIMON: John Irving's office is a floor above his home in a Toronto condo tower. Whoever thinks those things up should be shot. But both at my age and because I had a spinal fracture in July of 2020, I was told to get one of these - posture right, they're called. JOHN IRVING: I used to just write on clipboards. John Irving has written huge bestsellers, beginning with 'The World According To Garp.' And now at the age of 80, he's written his longest novel, putting pen to paper like a Dickensian scrivener on a slanted writing board.

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