Thursday, April 11, 7 p.m. — onstage conversation with Antonio Orejudo at the Biblioteca Jaume Fuster

HELSINKI, FINLAND:

Friday, April 19, 10:15 a.m. — reading and onstage interview at the University of Helsinki

PARIS, FRANCE:

Thursday, April 25, 8:30 p.m. — live television interview with François Busnel on La Grande Librairie

John Irving has previously toured for In One Person in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, and Switzerland.

Due to a recent hand surgery, John Irving will not be able to sign books or other articles at any event.

Check back for updates!

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The post John Irving’s IN ONE PERSON European Tour: April 2013 appeared first on John Irving.

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In this video John discusses his thirteenth novel, In One Person, and his bisexual narrator and main character, Billy Abbott. As Billy says: “We are formed by what we desire.”

The post John Irving discusses In One Person appeared first on John Irving.

John reads from the beginning of In One Person:

I’m going to begin by telling you about Miss Frost. While I say to everyone that I became a writer because I read a certain novel by Charles Dickens at the formative age of fifteen, the truth is I was younger than that when I first met Miss Frost and imagined having sex with her, and this moment of my sexual awakening also marked the fitful birth of my imagination. We are formed by what we desire. In less than a minute of excited, secretive longing, I desired to become a writer and to have sex with Miss Frost—not necessarily in that order.

I met Miss Frost in a library. I like libraries, though I have difficulty pronouncing the word—both the plural and the singular. It seems there are certain words I have considerable trouble pronouncing: nouns, for the most part—people, places, and things that have caused me preternatural excitement, irresolvable conflict, or utter panic. Well, that is the opinion of various voice teachers and speech therapists and psychiatrists who’ve treated me—alas, without success. In elementary school, I was held back a grade due to “severe speech impairments”—an overstatement. I’m now in my late sixties, almost seventy; I’ve ceased to be interested in the cause of my mispronunciations. (Not to put too fine a point on it, but fuck the etiology.)

(Read the complete excerpt here).

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John Irving introduces Billy Abbott, the bisexual narrator of In One Person.

“If you were, like me, at an all-boys’ boarding school in the fall of 1960, you felt utterly alone—you trusted no one, least of all another boy your age—and you loathed yourself. I’d always been lonely, but self-hatred is worse than loneliness.” — Billy Abbott, from In One Person.

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The post In One Person: Extended Excerpt appeared first on John Irving.

Sexual Outsiders: Three Questions with John Irving. 

PW caught up with John Irving to discover more about his forthcoming novel, In One Person (S&S, May). The book explores the nature of unfulfilled love through the voice of Billy, the bisexual narrator and main character, who tells the tragicomic story of his life.

Your publisher, Jonathan Karp, said that he couldn’t think of another contemporary American novelist who has written about bisexuality with such fervor. Do you agree, and if so, what accounts for that fervor?

The only part of “bisexual” that most straight men get is the gay part. Many gay men distrust bisexual men. Gay guys of my generation often believed that bisexuals didn’t really exist; they were usually presumed to be gay guys with one foot in the closet. And straight women trust bi guys even less than they trust straight guys. (A bi guy could leave you for another woman or for a guy.)

That said—and not to disagree with my editor—I wouldn’t claim that Billy is the most radical of my sexual outsiders or misfits. Dr. Larch in The Cider House Rules is an ether addict and an abortionist, but what’s strange about him is that he has sex once (with a prostitute) and stops for life; Jenny Fields, Garp’s mother, also has sex only once (with a comatose man); and Johnny Wheelwright, my “nonpracticing homosexual” narrator of Owen Meany, never has sex—not once, not with a man or a woman. For Billy to have sex with men and women doesn’t seem strange to me.

Read the full interview here

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A personal introduction from 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 homosexual”; his love for Owen Meany is repressed.  I always saw Johnny as a deeply closeted homosexual 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.

NEW: Paperback: Amazon • Barnes & Noble • IndieBound

Hardcover: Amazon • Barnes & Noble • IndieBound

E-Book: Amazon Kindle • Barnes & Noble Nook • Apple iBookstore

Audiobook: Amazon • Barnes & Noble • IndieBound • Audible • Apple iTunes

Video

In the clip below John discusses In One Person. To see more videos click here.

Audio

Listen to an exclusive clip from the audiobook of In One Person, read by Tony Award-winning actor John Benjamin Hickey.

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John Benjamin Hickey on Narrating the In One Person Audiobook

Tony Award-winning actor John Benjamin Hickey discusses his experience reading for the "In One Person" audiobook.

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John Irving discusses In One Person

In this video John discusses his thirteenth novel, In One Person, and his bisexual narrator and main character, Billy Abbott. As Billy says: "We are formed by what we desire."

Read More

John Irving reads from In One Person

John reads from the beginning of In One Person: I’m going to begin by telling you about Miss Frost. While I say to everyone that I became a writer because I read a certain novel by Charles Dickens at the formative age of fifteen, the truth is I was younger than that when I first met ...

Read More

John Irving introduces Billy Abbott

John Irving introduces Billy Abbott, the bisexual narrator of In One Person. "If you were, like me, at an all-boys' boarding school in the fall of 1960, you felt utterly alone—you trusted no one, least of all another boy your age—and you loathed yourself. I'd always been lonely, but self-hatred is worse than loneliness." -- Billy Abbott, from In ...

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The World According to John Irving: Documentary

A documentary about John Irving has just been released from German filmmaker André Schaefer, called "John Irving und wie er die Welt sieht" ("The World According to John Irving"). Here a link to the film's website (German text).

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The post In One Person appeared first on John Irving.

I always begin with a last sentence; then I work my way backwards, through the plot, to where the story should begin. The last sentence I began with this time is as follows: “He felt that the great adventure of his life was just beginning—as his father must have felt, in the throes and dire circumstances of his last night in Twisted River.” And there’s the title, waiting for you at the end of the story Last Night in Twisted River.

I was born and grew up in New Hampshire. My uncle was in the logging business, in the northern part of the state. When I was a teenager, there were big log drives on the Ammonoosuc and Androscoggin rivers.

My cousin Bayard is still a timberland man; he manages the Kennett Company in Conway, New Hampshire. He has taught me a lot about logging and lumber. When I was a teenager, my cousin Bayard also taught me how to walk on floating logs. (I wasn’t very good at it; Bayard was better.)

This novel, like the last one, is dedicated to my son Everett, who is now in college. I would never let Everett walk on floating logs.

Part One of Last Night in Twisted River is set in Coos County, New Hampshire (that’s northern New Hampshire) in 1954. The first chapter is titled “Under the Logs.”

I’m going to share the first three paragraphs of that chapter with you, so you’ll know how this novel begins with an accident. Here’s the beginning of “Under the Logs.”

The young Canadian, who could not have been more than fifteen, had hesitated too long. For a frozen moment, his feet had stopped moving on the floating logs in the basin above the river bend; he’d slipped entirely underwater before anyone could grab his outstretched hand. One of the loggers had reached for the youth’s long hair—the older man’s fingers groped around in the frigid water, which was thick, almost soupy, with sloughed-off slabs of bark. Then two logs collided hard on the would-be rescuers arm, breaking his wrist. The carpet of moving logs had completely closed over the young Canadian, who never surfaced; not even a hand or one of his boots broke out of the brown water.

Out on a logjam, once the key log was pried loose, the river drivers had to move quickly and continually; if they paused for even a second or two, they would be pitched into the torrent. In a river drive, death among moving logs could occur from a crushing injury, before you had a chance to drown—but drowning was more common.

From the riverbank, where the cook and his twelve-year-old son could hear the cursing of the logger whose wrist had been broken, it was immediately apparent that someone was in more serious trouble than the would-be rescuer, who’d freed his injured arm and had managed to regain his footing on the flowing logs. His fellow river drivers ignored him; they moved with small, rapid steps toward shore, calling out the lost boy’s name. The loggers ceaselessly prodded with their pike poles, directing the floating logs ahead of them. The rivermen were, for the most part, picking the safest way ashore, but to the cook’s hopeful son it seemed that they might have been trying to create a gap of sufficient width for the young Canadian to emerge. In truth, there were now only intermittent gaps between the logs. The boy who’d told them his name was “Angel Pope, from Toronto,” was that quickly gone.

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A documentary about John Irving has just been released from German filmmaker André Schaefer, called “John Irving und wie er die Welt sieht” (“The World According to John Irving”).

Here a link to the film’s website (German text).

The post The World According to John Irving: Documentary appeared first on John Irving.