World According to Garp is based on the John Irving novel by the same name. The movie tells the story of title character TS Garp (Robin Williams), raised solely and somewhat suffocatingly by his renowned feminist mother, Jenny Fields (Glen Close). The movie follows Garp from childhood, to his marriage to classmate Helen (Mary Beth Hurt), to their life as young marrieds beginning a family. Despite the promise that the future seems to hold for Garp, an aspiring writer, he feels weighed down by a foreboding of an unseen violent force. In the meantime, his mother gains notoriety as she champions the cause of females who've been victimized, most famously a transgendered football player, Roberta (John Lithgow).