“My life could be a movie,” you hear people say, but what do they mean? Don’t they mean their lives are too incredible to be real-too unbelievably good or bad? “My life could be a movie” means you think movies are both less than realistic and more than you can expect from real life. I wonder how many of these half-alive ghosts are aware of what has died in them, and-dead or alive-if there are rules for ghosts. In certain cases, you can be a ghost and still be half-alive-only a significant part of you has died. This gets complicated, because I know that not all ghosts are dead. As for the ghosts themselves, what happened to them? I mean, what made them ghosts? Not everyone who dies becomes a ghost. I can see ghosts, but not everyone can see them. Some of their names have been changed, but I haven’t changed a single essential thing about the ghosts. My ghosts are vivid to me-they’re very real. I’m not saying they don’t exist, but I’ve scarcely seen them.

No, I don’t mean those ghosts you may have heard were haunting the Jerome: the unregistered guest in Room 310, a drowned ten-year-old boy, shivering with cold and quickly disappearing, leaving only his wet footprints behind the lovelorn silver miner, whose late-night sobbing has been heard while his apparition roams the halls the pretty hotel maid who fell through the ice in a nearby pond and (notwithstanding that she died of pneumonia) occasionally appears just to turn down the beds. But if anything happens to you along the lines of what happened to me, you should leave. If you ever go to Aspen, you should stay there, if you can afford it. The Hotel Jerome is real-it’s a great hotel. I’ve changed some names, but not mine, and not the name of the hotel. My mother named me Adam, like you-know-who. His all-time bestselling novel, in every language, is A Prayer for Owen Meany. and in 2000, he won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Cider House Rules.

In 1980, he won a National Book Award for his novel The World According to Garp. He competed as a wrestler for twenty years, and coached wrestling until he was forty-seven.

Irving's first novel, Setting Free the Bears, was published in 1968, when he was twenty-six. The following is from John Irving's The Last Chairlift.

Setting free the bears by john irving