"The Hotel New Hampshire" by John Irving

Remarkably enough, my mother got me interested in this

book! Some time in the early/mid 1980s,

when she and I were driven by Pops to school and work every day,

she reached over the back seat to hand me a

Reader's Digest condensed book.

"You might find this interesting! It's so crazy, all the cussing!"

In it was a reduced form of Irving's Hotel New Hampshire,

which I immediately fell in love with.

(I went out and got my own copy of the original that weekend!)
I still choose to think Mom's sly pitch was her own

awkward attempt to address my homosexuality,

which obviously she was aware of on some

hyper-suppressed level.

Not all that much later (a year or two?) I was at a friend's

house in Iowa, and they had glorious premium cable!
Late one night, alone in the basement, I happened upon

the movie version of HNH and was mesmerized!
(I still maintain it one of the most faithful adaptations

of any book, ever!)
All of the cleverness, comedy, tragedy, and earnestness

of the book somehow made whole on the screen!

Possibly one of Irving's quirkiest, it has all the dark matter that he

excels at and which I relate to. It will likely always be my favorite.

No matter how juvenile and insane anyone else imagines it!