" I’m not poking fun at my own image but at how insistently book reviewers overemphasize autobiography in fiction—or trivialize it, as the case may be. For a serious novelist, there are recurring obsessions; repetition is the natural concomitant of having something worthwhile to say, and repeatedly needing to say it. Bears, wrestling, New England boarding schools, violent accidents—these are the mere landscape details in much of my fiction. But loss, and the fear of losing someone dear to you—these are obsessions. Anxiety, grief, the passage of time, the perils facing children (and other loved ones)—these are huge, and lingering, obsessions, and they are oft-repeated in my novels.

— john irving, from this interview.