My father the psychologist will flip out when he reads this, but it's true. I've joined a cult. It's not that I've disowned my family, you understand. But I've joined another highly enlightened one—The Family of Garp.

Yes, I'm a Garpist. I've become a missionary trying to spread the word of Garp, as in John Irving's astounding novel, The World According to Garp, one of the most passionate and outrageous novels I've ever read.

Yes, I believe in Garp—just as the book's soft-cover promotion people, who have spent ＄200,000 spreading the gospel, would like to hear. Normally, I'd cringe at the thought of marketing a novel like so much soap. But in the case of Garp, I'm delighted. The fact that Pocket Books has printed nearly 2 million soft-cover copies means a potential 2 million converts to Garpism.

True, I'm relatively late in joining the Garp-bandwagon since the book's been out more than a year. But time is only relative once you've seen The Light. And no, I haven't the vaguest idea how many fellow Garp cult members exist, though I suspect there must be thousands of us out there, judging by the recent sprouting up of Garp Fan Clubs across the country.

The spiritual leader of my cult is T. S. Garp, the son of a lobotomized ball-turret gunner and an eccentric nurse-turned feminist author. Living in a world where “an evening could be hilarious and the next morning could be murderous,” Garp does two things well: wrestle and write. And his creed, “Capitalize not on the emotions of others,” befits us all, maybe journalists more than others.

Garp tells each of us not to deny the need for a vision all one's own. He clearly draws the distinction between art and social responsibility, explaining that “the messes came when certain jerks attempted to combine these fields.”

My new-found religion celebrates the creative imagination in a violent world. “Imagining something is better than remembering something.” Chapter 19, Page 434. Garpism also celebrates the dying art of procrastination and the need for diversions, be they puttering around in the garden, fixing book shelves, leafing through telephone books or talking to hissing vegetables while cooking.

So immersed am I in the Garpist ideology that my husband and I recently discussed the idea of naming our first-born son Garp. And many of my waking hours since I finished the book have been devoted to wildly scheming up ways to meet John Irving, who is closer than anyone else to Garp.

One of the benefits of Garpism is that it requires little discipline, only passion. Being a Garpist means being flooded with energy (“full of Garp”). It means being kind to transsexuals, who could be your favorite professional football player. It means being sensitive to the vibe of the Under Toad, a catchword for anxiety.

And perhaps most important, Garpism requires understanding the persistent foibles of writers—be they novelists, poets, screenwriters, songwriters, journalists, letter-writers or even closet diary scribblers. Garp reminds us that we are all writers in some form or another, yet “the demands of writing and of real life are not always similar.”

Those of us who are lucky enough to earn a living by writing are all the more susceptible to becoming Garp fanatics, because we share our leader's guilt and expectations. “You want too much,” says Garp's remarkable wife Helen to him in an unusual display of anger. “Too much unqualified praise or love—or something that's unqualified, anyway. You want the world to say, ‘I love your writing, I love you,’ and that's too much to want. That's really sick, in fact.”

Yes, it's sick all right, but how many of us want it anyway?

And how many of us have been told by our loved ones that our devotion to writing (substitute the word working) transcends our devotion and vulnerability to family and friends? “There's so much sympathy for people in what you write,” Garp's transsexual friends tells him, much like his mother. “But I don't see that much sympathy in you, in your real life.”

Well, enough of my preaching Garp's word. As he puts it: “You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.” (“Even if these so-called endings and beginnings are illusions,” adds novelist Irving.)

So, I'll end this piece here and think about beginning a new one. Then I get to deal with the next Garpian dilemma: “Nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.”