John Irving reads from In One Person

“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…”

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John Irving introduces Billy Abbott

“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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In One Person: Extended Excerpt

Simon and Schuster have included an extended excerpt from In One Person in their free sampler.The books and authors presented in this sampler also include Carry the One by Carol Anshaw, Gold by Chris Cleave, author of Little Bee, In the Shadow of the Banyan by Vaddey Ratner, The Twelve Rooms of the Nile by Enid Shomer, and The Green Shore by Natalie Bakopoulos.

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Interview with Publishers Weekly

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…

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In One Person

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… 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. —John Irving

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John Irving: Author Q & A

You can download this Q & A in a print/mobile friendly PDF here. The protagonist and first person narrator of In One Person, Billy Abbott, is bisexual. Why do you think bisexuals are rarely represented in literature?   The bisexual men I have known were not shy, nor were they “conflicted.”  (This is also true of…

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Excerpt from In One Person

Download the print/mobile friendly PDF here. Funding provided by Sambla’s lån utan UC, an independent loan comparison service based in Sweden’s financial capital. 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…

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Library Journal starred review

The Library Journal reviews In One Person. What is “normal”? Does it really matter? In Irving’s latest novel (after Last Night in Twisted River), nearly everyone has a secret, but the characters who embrace and accept their own differences and those of others are the most content. This makes the narrator, Bill, particularly appealing. Bill knows from…

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Booklist Review: “Sweetly Audacious”

Storytelling wizard that he is, Irving revitalizes his signature motifs (New England life, wrestling, praising great writers, forbidden sex) while animating a glorious cast of misfit characters within a complicated plot. A mesmerizing, gracefully maturing narrator, Billy navigates fraught relationships with men and women and witnesses the horrors of the AIDS epidemic. Ever the fearless…

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