The Current - John Irving on the power of reading

Episode Date: November 17, 2025

Because of Donald Trump, John Irving, the bestselling author is refusing to go to the United States to promote his latest novel, Queen Esther — but he thinks you should read it so you can understand and empathize with the plight of others

Don't you just love those days when you're sitting alone, maybe reading or listening to a podcast and not talking to anyone? According to Kieran Desai, author of The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, sometimes solitude can be a gift. There was nothing more beautiful than being alone, watching the snow falls slowly outside, starting to write myself. So it was kind of a heaven, really. Next time you're settling in for some quality alone time, head to bookends with Matea Roach to hear that conversation. Available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast.

Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. A new book by the writer John Irving is always a big deal. He is the author of novels like The World According to Garp and a Prayer for Owen Meaney. He is one of the greats. His new novel is called Queen Esther, and it returns to the world of his 1985 bestseller, The Cider House Rules,

with a new story and new characters. Forty years after the Sider House rules came out, it is another story that looks at abortion and autonomy, particularly women's autonomy, released at a time when the country of John Irving's birth, the United States, is still grappling with those very issues. But despite the relevance of its themes, John Irving will not be crossing the border into the U.S. to promote this book.

He is an American-Canadian dual citizen, now living in Canada. And John Irving joins me in our Toronto studio. John Irving, good morning. nice to see you again it's great to have you here you've done this before but how does it feel to launch a book out into the world well there's enough passage of time between the books so that it really is an exciting experience every time the publication happens I feel very fortunate that since the writing of my fourth book I've been able to support myself as a writer and I I've been able to do, as my mother once said with shock, do you mean you're going to just

write, which, of course, was a goal for me, but she found the whole idea of that someone suspicious. Does it get easier, book after book, to write? Yes and no. You are more familiar, or I am more familiar, because my process repeats itself. As an ending-driven writer, I'm always working with a timeline and a cast of characters from where they end to where I believe they should begin. I know more about the end than I do the beginning. So you've become more familiar with your own process, I think. And in that sense, the familiarity makes you less afraid because you remember other times. There were hard places to navigate. But if you keep your timeline straight and everybody's designated role as a character, it all works out.

Less afraid of a blank page, do you mean? Less afraid of a misdirection. This happens most often with minor characters who grow into more interesting characters than you first imagined. You kind of know the most about the most important ones. but then every once in a while a secondary or a tertiary character will convince you to give him or her more to do. You said as you came in,

I mean, in some ways this novel, that process has been turned on its head because you're returning to a familiar story in some ways, going back to the cider house rules and some of the characters that are there. How did that... Would you have been surprised that you were returning to some of those themes,

themes around abortion, I mean, anti-Semitism comes up in this book, the politics of abortion. Are you surprised all these years later that you would go back to some of those themes or that you would be still writing about some of those themes? Yes and no. Because I always wanted to create a timeline, a storyline,

for an empathetic Jewish child who is abandoned before she is for when her life has already been constructed by anti-Semitism. I always knew I was setting a character on a path as a Viennese-born Jew in 1905. She's on a trajectory to become one of those early Zionists who will be part of the foundation of Israel. I knew that's who she was. I knew it was vital. Regardless how people felt about the state of Israel, I had to stay on course with her so that any reader would recognize if there's a child who grows up knowing it's not safe to be Jewish, this is who this adult will become. Jewish childhood has been stolen from her

and by the time she leaves the orphanage a ward of the state working for a family who has taken her in she has a lot of Jewishness to make up for so that it was always my purpose to send her back to her birth city everyone wants to know where they came from but of course it's the 1930s

and other Viennese Jews have already left or are in the process of leaving, it was important for Esther's story that she's going the wrong way, that she's going to Vienna at a time when her people are fleeing. Because I wanted to create for her every good reason to be a part of her also going to where she came from, the land of Judah, the land of the Israelites. And knowing I needed an orphan who would be the survivor of Judah, family who's left Europe in a timely fashion, I knew the guy. I knew the orphanage. I knew the physician who would do everything in his power to protect her, to find her a home.

Wilbur Larch. Yes. And so I knew much more about Larch and his nurses than I normally know about formative characters in the early chapters of a novel. And it was also a perfect fit for me. that Larch and his nurses would be significantly younger than readers or moviegoers who know the cider house rules will remember because it was equally important that I have a completely different cast of characters among the orphans no one would take. And it was simply my job to, I'll show you an orphan no one will take. No one's going to take Esther, given her story.

And so I was, for the first time, on equally comfortable footing in the early chapters, as I always am with the chapter I'm writing toward. So that was new. That was different. People would remember from the Sider House rules. I mean, Wilbur Larch provides abortions. And, I mean, that was, you're writing that book 40 years ago, or at least it's published 40 years ago. Yeah.

When you think about, I mean, that that theme continues. through this book. Would you have imagined that that would still be, we're now in this post-Rovie Wade world, right? Yeah. Could you have imagined that that would have come to pass? Many people thought that that was settled business in the United States.

You see, that was the problem. That people thought it was settled business. I remember very, very keenly, when Cider House was published, how many of my friends, good feminists, people that I had worked with in Planned Parenthood facilities and people who knew my mother, who had been a nurse's aide and a family counselor. Her principal job was trying to advise young, unmarried women and girls who were pregnant,

often girls who were at the time too young to be having sex under the laws of New Hampshire. this both before Roe versus Wade and after and I remember people you know whose politics I shared saying well it's nice but it's kind of quaint that you've written this historical novel now that

now that it's safe now that abortion is available and is safe and I remember saying which caused some stress if you think it's safe if you think it'll ever be safe you might be part of the reason it isn't. Because I didn't write that novel as history. Historical novels interest me. I didn't

write it as history to say, look at this terrible time when this procedure was unsafe and illegal. Look what happened then. It was sizably written as a warning as a way of saying, don't let this happen again. That this could happen again. And that this could happen again. And my brother, and sisters, we talk frequently about my mother, who has since passed away. And perhaps this is only to comfort ourselves, but we say how glad we are that she didn't live to see the day when abortion rights went backward. Because if she were alive, that would have killed her, looking at the current administration in the United States, it is only one example of the sexually bigoted backwardness of my birth country.

Is that why you're not going back? I mean, this business of not traveling to the states to promote this book. I've spoken with Margaret Atwood, who's down there, she's been doing some traveling now promoting her memoirs. And then Louise Penny, another Canadian treasure, who's not doing that. How did you come to that decision? Well, it didn't take, it didn't take long, Matt. I made that decision in January when Trump had been in office less than a month and was only beginning to overreach his executive powers in the so-called executive orders he was issuing.

And it was clear to me in the most hateful, most transphobic executive. order that declared there were only two sexes, men and women, and they are the sexes you were born with, and ordering trans men and women to change the gender on their passport if they had changed it back to being in agreement with their birth certificates. The sheer backwardness of that to someone who remembers those decades of protest, which were in my growing up years, late 50s, 60s, 70s, they were formative of my pride in a country where freedom of speech, including freedom of protest, really mattered in the civil rights days, in the gay rights days, think of the Stonewall riots, think of all the protests against the war in Vietnam. Well, I am drawn to the past because of what a teacher history is. I'm drawn to that in my fiction.

Certainly, as many as half, or more than half of my novels are historical, and it's not coincidental that they tend to be the most political of my novels. But I felt it was essential to protest again. this authoritarian bully in the White House who is abusing his best allies and who is turning back the clock on on so many issues of equality and sexual freedom I've long believed in. I have long been an ally in my fiction of LGBTQ rights. And as I have long been been an ally of women's rights and abortion rights. And to see what this fascist has wrought, how he has made my beloved birth country virtually

unrecognizable to me. I felt, and of course, since that time when I made this decision in January, that I would not go to the U.S. to promote this new novel, well, it's only gotten worse. the cowardly Republicans in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives have been complicit in their silence. I wouldn't be surprised if Trump doesn't find or make some excuse to cancel the midterm elections. That would be in keeping with his violations of democracy. He might declare martial law and say that elections were unsafe. As you, You know, he's already rumbled and grumbled about the rights of Americans who live abroad.

And a third term as well. He's mused about a third term. Oh, mused is, may we all be protected from what that man muses. The headlines never stop and it's harder than ever to tell what's real, what matters, and what's just noise. That's where Pats of America comes in. I'm Tommy Vitor, and every week I'm joined by fellow former Obama aides John Favreau, John Lovett, and Dan Pfeiffer to break down the biggest stories, unpack what they mean for the future of our democracy,

and add just enough humor to stay sane along the way. You'll also hear honest, in-depth conversations with big voices in politics, media, and culture, like Rachel Maddow, Gavin Newsom, and Mark Cuban that you won't find anywhere else. New episodes drop every Tuesday and Friday with deep dives every other weekend. Listen wherever you get your podcast, watch on YouTube, or subscribe on Apple Podcasts for ad-free episodes. Can I ask you about reading and writing? You write, this isn't as big of a book as you have written in past, but you write big books. The idea of reading runs through this book. I mean, Esther's going to get a tattoo on her chest, a quotation from Charlotte Bronte. There's talk about the power of novels and about turning yourself over to imagination. Do you worry about that? Do you worry? I mean, we live in this time now where this thing, the phone is the thing that sucks up a lot of people's attention. And they say, well, I don't have time to read that book. I couldn't possibly. Do you worry about that? that? You know, my grandmother, who I lived with for the first six years of my life, and then because I knew her so well, and she knew me so well as a child, even when I moved out of her

house with my mother and my brand new stepfather, whom I loved, I continued to spend lots of time with my grandmother in her house. My grandmother, who recognized all my life, that I was, in her estimation, a worrier. This often meant I was just writing, which looked like worrying to her or appeared to be worrisome to her, given what I wrote about. But she said to me, which was most beneficial, I think, in my teenage years,

worry about the things you can change, Johnny. Don't waste your time worrying about the things you can't. What do you think we lose? If you can't change it, what do we lose? I think we've lost a lot. One reason I know this is also coincidental map. For the writing of my first four novels, I paid no attention to a bestseller list

because I was never on one. But with the fourth novel, the world according to Garb, suddenly, for the first time, I was on that list. Suddenly for the first time, I had not one, not two, but many, foreign translations. And for the first time with that fourth novel, I paid attention to the fiction list. And I'll tell you what's changed. It's devastating for writers of literary fiction. For the first time, I'm looking at lists from everywhere, from all over Europe and not only

my birth country. And they were very similar to one another in this respect. Yes, as you would expect there were more German books on a German bestseller list in fiction, etc. So nationality was certainly represented, but here was the percentage that was the same in country after country after country. Of the top 25 on a bestseller list in fiction, there were as many as seven or eight, never as many as ten, but there were seven or eight, sometimes even nine. literary novels among those 25 look at a comparable list today and on a fiction list you'll be lucky to find three maybe four at tops why does that matter do you think well the commerciality of literary fiction is surely not what it used to be you look at a fiction list now and it is overwhelmingly

represented by the genre stuff, the horror stories, the romances, the thrillers, the detective stories, the fantasy stuff. And often one of the three literary writers on that list, you suspect, is there because there's recently been a film or a TV series of one of their novels, which has a huge influence on that same writer's popular representation. You see it beyond the bestsellers, though. I mean, you ride the subway in Toronto. And you look at what people are, what's in people's hands when they're on the train. Good for you.

Good for you for remembering that. But, you know, that's not as much fun as it used to be. Because we know. Because it's hard to find anyone who's looking at anything but their phone. And, yeah, my wife and daughter say, well, people are reading, some people are reading novels on their phone. Some people are, but not when their thumbs keep moving. I love public transit. I always have.

When I lived in New York, when I lived in Vienna, and those are the only three cities I lived in for an appreciable period of time, Vienna, New York, and here. And I love here better than anywhere. But it can be a dispiriting trip to the degree that when I see someone reading a novel, even if, in my estimation, it's not a terribly good one, I want to thank them. And when I see a man, especially an older man, you know, if it's a younger man, he may be reading that book because it's been assigned to him in school or university. but if it's an older man and that older man is reading fiction, I really have to hold myself back from wanting to hug him. He would likely take that the wrong way. And I think I make a nuisance of myself sometimes by, you know,

it's hard to see the cover of a book someone's reading on the... You're peering around on train. I'm trying to say, is that what I think it? And so the reader becomes uncomfortably aware that I'm, scrutinizing them. Do you think about what your books have meant to people? I was reading a review of Queen Esther in the New York Times, and the writer talked about clinging to the cider house rules like a life preserver. Your books have changed people's lives. Do you think about that? I'll throw a question back to you that I keep wondering about. I think books do change lives

Up to a certain age, I don't know that anything you read is necessarily going to affect you in a life-changing way. Or maybe it makes it just an imprint. If you're not of a formative age, maybe that's, I'm just basing too much on my own experience because of how much what I read as a teenager became the models of the form. Two 19th century writers, especially Dickens, who made me. me want to be a novelist when I was 15 when I first read great expectations. And Melville, whose Moby Dick when I was 17 and read it, made me see, oh, this is what my process should be. I put those two guys together. And by the time I was 17, going on 18, I had the writer who

meant the most of me emotionally or dramatically, that being Dickens. But Melville was where the structure came from. Melville was the guy who made me aware of an ending driven architecture to a story. So, well, I'm certainly an example of someone who was changed or was made a writer because of what I read and at the very formative age I was when I read those two authors the 19th century

remains the model of the form for the novel for me I remember a long ago conversation Michael Ondachi and I had about becoming a writer Michael said and I completely agreed with him we were having dinner somewhere

I don't remember And he said something along the lines of writers don't talk enough about the books they read that made them want to be writers. And the moment he said that, I thought, I couldn't think of another writer except me who had said the same thing. Maybe that speaks to the bit about what people just finally, like what we might be losing if people aren't reading. Do you know what I mean? That if people aren't reading, they're not going to have those formative experiences. They had those with your books. They've had those with your novels over time.

And if people are just looking at the phone on the train, that's not going to be activated in the same way. I'm afraid that's true. I also think that what do you learn, you know, the best teacher there is to inform you of what's happening now is what happened to make this happen. And that was my goal, you know, my end goal, my end-driven goal in Queen Esther. So I think when you say what is lost by not reading those books that can be formative or life-changing, I think what really is lost is a sense of where everything comes from. Again, to touch on a political subject, we know fascism is making, has made a comeback in Europe, where in so many people's minds it is at least recognizable.

What's frightening about the rise of authoritarianism, totalitarianism, a dictatorship, an autocracy in the United States, is that I don't know how many Americans know what fascism looks like. Well, they're in it. Right now they're in it. And I don't know how many of them recognize it's absolutely not democratic components. I don't know if they can tell the difference between an authoritarian dictator and a democratic president. What Trump is doing in the overreach of his executive powers is overreaching democracy. but I don't know how many Americans recognize it for what it is.

Perhaps reading, again, those books from history would help people have a better sense as to what's unfolding right now. John Irving, it's, I just, any, as I said at the beginning, any new writing from you is big news. It's always a pleasure to read your books, and it's a real pleasure to have the opportunity to sit and talk about the importance of reading. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to see you again. John Irving's latest novel is Queen Esther. me in our Toronto studio. You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca slash podcasts.