Personal Life
In 1964 Irving married Shyla Leary, whom he had met at Harvard in 1963 while taking a summer course in German, before traveling to Vienna, Austria with IES Abroad. They had two sons, Colin and Brendan, and divorced in the early 1980s. In 1987, he married Janet Turnbull, who had been his publisher at Bantam-Seal Books and is now one of his literary agents. They have a teenage son, Everett. Irving has homes in Vermont, Toronto, and Pointe au Baril. He soon became much involved in Toronto and so close to Robertson Davies that he was asked to and delivered part of Davies' 1995 funeral.
Irving was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2007, and subsequently had a radical prostatectomy.
In 2010 Irving confirmed that he is a second cousin of Amy Bishop, an assistant professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville who is facing murder charges after allegedly shooting six colleagues, killing three, during a department meeting, also in 2010.
Read more about this topic: John Irving
Famous quotes containing the words personal and/or life:
“... it is a rather curious thing to have to divide one’s life into personal and official compartments and temporarily put the personal side into its hidden compartment to be taken out again when one’s official duties are at an end.”
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“I want relations which are not purely personal, based on purely personal qualities; but relations based upon some unanimous accord in truth or belief, and a harmony of purpose, rather than of personality. I am weary of personality.... Let us be easy and impersonal, not forever fingering over our own souls, and the souls of our acquaintances, but trying to create a new life, a new common life, a new complete tree of life from the roots that are within us.”
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