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A special note to you from John Irving:
Dear Readers,
In January 2005, I was driving north to Rutland, Vermont, on a snowy road. An old Bob Dylan song was yowling away on the car CD-player.
I was thinking about my next novel, my twelfth. It's about a cook and his son. They live in a rough place, a sawmill and logging-camp kind of town. Something awful happens; they have to leave town in a hurry. But something else happens later; the cook's son is compelled to go back to the town he and his father ran away from. That's all I knew. I didn't know what made the son return to the scene of the crime, or what made the father and son leave in the first place. The Bob Dylan song on my car CD-player was "Tangled Up in Blue." I've probably heard that song a hundred times, but on that cold, early morning one stanza jumped out at me.
I had a job in the great north woods
Working as a cook for a spell
But I never did like it all that much
And one day the ax just fell.
By the time I got to Rutland, I knew the last sentence of my novel—that's where I begin a book, with the last sentence. From there, I work my way back to where the story begins. In eleven out of twelve novels, the last sentence has come first.
I wrote the last sentence of my next novel on a pad of prescription paper in my orthopedic surgeon's office. Here it is: "He felt that the great adventure of his life was just beginning—as his father must have felt, in the throes and dire circumstances of his last night in Twisted River."
And there, too, of course, was the novel's title: Last Night in Twisted River.
—JOHN IRVING
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