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
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