Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Fiction Tuesday - In One Person



A compelling novel of desire, secrecy, and sexual identity, In One Person is a story of unfulfilled love—tormented, funny, and affecting—and an impassioned embrace of our sexual differences. Billy, the bisexual narrator and main character of In One Person, tells the tragicomic story (lasting more than half a century) of his life as a “sexual suspect,” a phrase first used by John Irving in 1978 in his landmark novel of “terminal cases,” The World According to Garp.
His most political novel since The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving’s In One Person is a poignant tribute to Billy’s friends and lovers—a theatrical cast of characters who defy category and convention. Not least, In One Person is an intimate and unforgettable portrait of the solitariness of a bisexual man who is dedicated to making himself “worthwhile.”-Book Description
Ezra Miller would be my cast as Billy, the main character of the novel in my dreamcast.



"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." John Irving says about his new novel. He also says Billy is not him. "He comes from my imagining what I might have been like if I’d acted on all my earliest impulses as a young teenager." Irving says instead.



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. “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.”



Many are giving this the vote of the BEST  BOOK of 2012.

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8 comments:

  1. Interesting!! Will have to look this up to buy :) Thanks for coming by. Have a super day :) x

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  2. This sounds like an incredibly interesting read! :)

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  3. Ezra is so ambiguous in this photos. I can clearly see him as Billy.

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  4. this sounds really interesting.

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  5. Oh .. wow..I love this author's work.

    Ezra never looked better.

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  6. Wow, It does look like a cool story.

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  7. I guess I see everything in political terms, but, to me, this is vintage John Irving simply making a plea for sexual tolerance. The problem is that unless someone close to you is a part of the LGBT community, you may simply see the book as a justification for sexual extremes only effecting a small part of our society. In much the same way, there is little interest in the Afghan war because it only effects so few people in the country directly. Irving presents a powerful case in his own literary style for the effect that congenital sexual preference has on our lives from early childhood to old age. All these people ask is that we allow them to live their lives with the same respect and civil guarantees that we all expect as citizens. What we saw in the 80s was a devastating epidemic ignored by our government because of the influence of religious zealotry on a conservative administration. I do think we've come a long way though.

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  8. Thank you Brasil for sharing your comments about the book. I greatly appreciate you taking the time and giving such thoughtful feedback. Thank you, for giving us this treat.

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