EDITOR’S NOTE: The World According to Garp was on the CBS Late Movie on September 11 and November 27, 1987.

For some reason, my parents let me watch this when I was ten and between someone losing their penis in the mouth of a lover when their car is hit from behind and the tragic ending, I was changed. In fact, the end upset me so much, as it made me realize that I too would die, that I didn’t sleep for days.

Directed by George Roy Hill (Thoroughly Modern Millie, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting, The Great Waldo Pepper, Slap Shot, Slaughterhouse-Five, Funny Farm) and written by Steve Tesich (Breaking Away), this was based on the book by Clifford Irving.

T.S. Garp (Robin Williams) was born after his mother, Jenny Fields (Glenn Close), took advantage of a brain-dead tailgunner, injured in combat during World War II. She mounted him, he got her pregnant, he died, Garp was born. Jenny writes Sexual Suspect, the story of her life, and becomes a feminist icon, while Garp marries Helen (Mary Beth Hurt), has two boys named Duncan and Walt, and becomes a fiction writer.

A girl named Ellen James (Amanda Plummer) has been assaulted and her tongue cut out. The women who gather around Garp’s mother all begin to cut out their own tongues, despite Ellen telling them not to. Helen cheats on Garp; he rams into the car where she is going down on one of her students, causing the death of their son, Walt and Duncan to lose an eye. His mother is killed by an assassin, and he can’t even go to her funeral until transgender football player Roberta Muldoon (John Lithgow) sneaks him in.

Speaking of Roberta, she’s why Irving wouldn’t write the script: “It was the early 1980s when George Roy Hill asked me if I would write the screenplay for Garp, but I knew we didn’t see eye to eye about Roberta. George was a World War II guy; he couldn’t see past the comedic part of a transgender woman who’d been an NFL player. A pity, because John Lithgow, who was cast as Roberta in the film, could have played her as I wrote her. Roberta is a force of normality in an otherwise extreme world; she is the only character who loves Garp and his mother equally, the only character who isn’t in a rage about someone or something. I declined to write the Garp script because George wouldn’t do Roberta my way.”

At the end, Garp is shot and is airlifted to the hospital and maybe Heaven as he remembers his mom throwing him in the air as “When I’m 64” plays. I had loved that song as a kid, so hearing it in this way horrified me.

I still don’t know how I feel about this movie.