Dead boring!

Dead Boring,
I bought this ebook without examination firstly. That should teach me. All I knew was that I could not believe there was a NEW novel by John Irving and the title was sort of titillating. I started reading it looking so forward to John Irving style and words, ideas, evrrthing, then I noticed that it was a very short book. I looked to see when it was published, fairly recently and then I saw MEMOIR on the cover and indeed it was. I've always been a huge fan of John Irving and decided to go ahead and dig deeper. Then almost 80% of the book was about wrestling. I knew that wrestling was part of his life, but I had no idea how much a part. Sure, there was a pass at his writing career, just a pass but if HE thought himself so insignificant as a writer, I was truly disappointed. This can only be compared too seeing an ad for a new book by Joyce Carol Pages and being very excited by the idea of a new book by her only to sing in and find out that the most important thing about the book was about boxing!!! That actually happened to me. Thre, two weak books by two of my all time favorite writers and my time, I felt, was wasted and I was dead bored! Just have done some simple homework. You can tell, I think, that after all of my anticipation, how let down I felt. I hope someone can relate to this.

Irving is such a fantastic writer, but I expected much more. His memoir is mostly about his wrestling days. I expected to read much more about his writing life.

3 1/2 stars. Enjoyable but not terribly hefty. If I knew wrestling holds it would help more. I haven't read any Irving in forever and I figured I'd start back small.

This is a good memoir if you like wrestling. But since I know nothing about it, the book wasn’t for me.

John Irving became one of my favorite authors after I read "A Prayer for Own Meany" - one of the best books ever to come out of contemporary American fiction. When I picked up his memoir, "The Imaginary Girlfriend," I expected to learn a lot about his writing life, which I did. What I didn't expect was to learn a lot about collegiate wrestling. John Irving is a wrestler (even though he doesn't wrestle or coach any more) as much as he is a writer, and this autobiographical glimpse of his athletic career shows how much the sport has impacted him as a writer and as a human being. It also points out how much his character Johnny Wheelright (from "Owen Meany") is based on his own life. Irving's voice is witty and humerous, and reading him is like hearing an old friend. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to know more about this extraordinary writer and his life. He's one of the best America has ever produced.

This is a fun and quick read by one of my all time favorite authors. John Irving is a true treasure!

It's been difficult trying the sleep this past week, during the aftermath of Hurricane Helene and ongoing relief efforts and lack of utilities, so I was able to finish reading this over two somewhat sleepless nights using a headlamp.

Those hoping this memoir will reveal more of the sources for the themes in Irving's novels will be mostly disappointed. He speaks in great detail about his life as a wrestler/wrestling coach/wrestling parent as well as the people he's encountered during his early years of writing, including Kurt Vonnegut and John Cheever, to name the ones most familiar to me.

As a former wrestler, his recollections jarred loose some memories from my years of "sucking weight," running for hours in several layers of clothing in AC-free wrestling rooms hoping to lose excess water.

Like many, however, I would have liked to get more insight into why Irving writes the stories he does.

Alas, I don't think we'll ever get that, outside a few passing comments in interviews. On the other hand, he did reveal several biographical bits of information that I was able to trace back to some of his characters; it helps that I've read nearly a dozen of his novels.

Not the memoir I expected.

2.75 stars

I have loved everything I have read written by John Irving - some more than others, but every one was enjoyable in its own right. I am not a fan of wrestling, and although many words here are devoted to this aspect of his life, I found myself racing through the book, eager to learn more about the man who is my favorite contemporary author.

This memoir tells us John's history in his own words and includes the importance of wrestling, a trip to Austria, tales of motorbikes and New England all of which are recurrent themes in his fiction. I was just waiting for a pet bear.

This short little mini-memoir was an interesting read by Irving. Interesting because I feel like he chose to tunnel his life into very specific topics. He spends a lot of time recapping his and his sons' wrestling careers, and while normally I might have found this quite boring, I am almost used to reading about wrestling at length from reading Irving's book before this.

I think what I found most surprising what that he claims to hate Vienna after spending time there in college and after college, and I always assumed to he loved it there and that is why more than one of his books were set there.

I'd really only recommend this one to fanatical Irving fans and not casual Irving fans and definitely not those crazy people who can't appreciate Irving. (You know who you are.)