John Irving and I began our interview in a bathroom. It was a humid afternoon last May at a hotel in London. When I arrived, CNN was making a short documentary in Irving’s hotel room, delaying the interview half an hour. As I made my way into his room, the television crew were lugging their equipment out into the corridor. I stood in the narrow space between the bedroom and the living area, where Irving stood drinking a cup of tea.

“If you want more tea, you’re gonna have to go downstairs and get another cup, I’m afraid. There is none left,” Irving said, matter-of-factly.

He was dressed in a black shell tracksuit, a pair of white sneakers, and appeared as if he was getting ready to partake in an afternoon wrestling match. When I glanced back at him, he was standing directly in front of a mirror, watching himself drink tea, occasionally pausing to grab a cookie. Then he turned to me.

“Ever see the crazy things they have for the showers in these hotel rooms? What do you make of that, eh?” He walked into the bathroom, placing his hand firmly on the panel of white plastic that functioned as the shower door.

“You think they would just put a normal shower curtain in,” I said, uncertain as to whether I should follow him into the bathroom or shout my opinion from outside the door.

“I know, right! That’s exactly what I was thinking,” he replied, laughing.

I first came in contact with the world of John Irving eight years ago. It was a muggy night in an overcrowded train station in Varanasi. The train had been delayed twelve hours, and the only way to distract myself from the ensuing chaos was to leap into the New Hampshire world of baseball, magic, and divine intervention.

I was reading A Prayer for Owen Meany, a novel that is essentially about the loss of childhood. That first time I read it, I had misunderstood, thinking that Irving was a religious man. Then, later, when I realised it was actually about Irving’s lack of faith, the subject matter seemed even more poignant to me. When I boarded the train, I had a forty-four hour journey ahead of me, but with Owen Meany in my backpack, I didn’t care.

Eight years later, in a five-star-hotel bathroom, I suddenly wanted to reveal to Irving all the sentimental crap about what his book had meant to me on my travels around India as a naïve 21-year-old. Instead, I just nodded in agreement about how the standard shower curtain certainly seemed a more appropriate finish for this particular bathtub.

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