Amazon Best Books of the Month, May 2012: Very few authors can
create and sustain a cast of unique and unforgettable characters
like John Irving. In One Person is a masterfully told story of
identity, relationships, and the struggle that comes with living
a life outside of the mainstream. The central figure in Irving’s
lovely and strange novel is Billy; the narration jumps between
different phases of Billy’s life, beginning with his most
formative years as a teenager in the 1960’s discovering his
bisexuality. Irving doesn’t shy away from the difficulties of
sexual exploration and identity, forcing Billy, his friends, and
his family (and the reader) to confront and question their
beliefs and prejudices. Each new phase of Billy’s life brings new
characters into the fold, but everyone serves a purpose and the
ending rewards close reading. The world is not a black-and-white
place, and Irving’s colorful characters embody all of the shades
in-between. --Caley Anderson
An Exclusive Guest Essay from John Irving
John Irving
In One Person is about a young bisexual man who falls in love
with an older transgender woman--Miss Frost, the librarian in a
Vermont public library. The bi guy is the main character, but two
transgender women are the heroes of this novel--in the sense that
these two characters are the ones my bisexual narrator, Billy
Abbott, most looks up to. Billy is not me. He comes from my
imagining what I might have been like if I’d acted on all my
earliest impulses as a young teenager. Most of us don’t ever act
on our earliest sexual imaginings. In fact, most of us would
rather forget them--not me. I think our sympathy for others
comes, in part, from our ability to remember our feelings--to be
honest about what we felt like doing. Certainly, sexual tolerance
comes from being honest with ourselves about what we have
imagined sexually.
Those adults who are always telling children and young adults to
abstain from doing everything--well, they must have never had a
childhood or an adolescence (or they’ve conveniently forgotten
what they were like when they were young).
When I was a boy, I imagined having sex with my friends’
mothers, with girls my own age--yes, even with certain older boys
among my wrestling teammates. It turned out that I liked girls,
but the memory of my attractions to the “wrong” people never left
me. What I’m saying is that the impulse to bisexuality was very
strong; my earliest sexual experiences--more important, my
earliest sexual imaginings--taught me that sexual desire is
mutable. In fact, in my case--at a most formative age--sexual
mutability was the norm. What made me a writer was definitely a
combination of what I read and what I imagined--especially, what
I imagined sexually.
Billy meets the transgender librarian, Miss Frost, because he
goes to the library seeking novels about “crushes on the wrong
people.” Miss Frost starts him out with the Brontë
sisters--specifically, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. She
expresses less confidence in Fielding’s Tom Jones, which she also
gives Billy. As she puts it, “If one can count sexual escapades
as one result of crushes--"
Later, when Billy has become an avid reader and he returns to
the library confessing his crush on an older boy on the wrestling
team, Miss Frost--who has earlier given Billy novels by Dickens
and Hardy--gives him Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. (This is the same
night she seduces him.)
“We are formed by what we desire,” Billy tells us--in the first
paragraph of the first chapter. He adds: “I desired to become a
writer and to have sex with Miss Frost—not necessarily in that
order.”
Later in the novel, Billy realizes this about himself: “I knew
that no one person could rescue me from wanting to have sex with
men and women.”
My first-person novels are confessional stories about sexually
taboo subjects. The 158-Pound Marriage is about wife-swapping.
The narrator of The Hotel New Hampshire is incestuously in love
with his sister. Johnny Wheelwright, the narrator of A Prayer for
Owen Meany, is called (behind his back) a “nonpracticing
sexual”; his love for Owen Meany is repressed. I always saw
Johnny as a deeply closeted sexual who would never come out.
In One Person is a much shorter novel than Owen Meany, and Billy
is an easier first-person voice to be in--Billy is very out.
Billy says: “I wanted to look like a gay boy--or enough like one
to make other gay boys, and men, look twice at me. But I wanted
the girls and women to wonder about me--to make them look twice
at me, too. I wanted to retain something provocatively masculine
in my appearance.” Billy remembers when he is cast as Ariel in
The Tempest, and Richard (the director) tells him that Ariel’s
gender is “mutable.” (Richard tells Billy that the sex of angels
is mutable, too.) Billy later says: “I suppose I was trying to
look sexually mutable, to capture something of Ariel’s unresolved
sexuality.” He concludes: “There is no one way to look bisexual,
but that was the look I sought.”
Billy doesn’t start out so sure of himself. “You’re a man,
aren’t you?” he asks Miss Frost, when he discovers that she used
to be a man. “You’re a transsexual!” he tells her, accusingly.
Miss Frost speaks sharply to him: “My dear boy, please don’t put
a label on me--don’t make me a category before you get to know
me!”
As Billy learns--in part, from being bisexual--our genders and
orientations do not define us. We are somehow greater than our
sexual identities, but our sexual identities matter.
