In One Person by John Irving

ANOTHER fantastic read from John Irving. One of the things I love about Irving are his epic family tales (Until I Find You for example) where an emotionally isolated young man seeks to know himself and his family. There’s a real lost father theme and also a close male-female relationship that borders and sometimes crosses over into the sexual but is really about knowing and accepting one another. And the characters are always extreme, bizarre in many cases, wonderfully eccentric. Dig a little deeper and you find you do actually know people like them I think. This book is about Billy/Bill/William who is bisexual. He struggles with his sexual identity all through school and early adulthood, trying to make sense of who he is against the backdrop of homophobia (and everything else of a ‘different’ sexual nature-phobia) of the 70s, 70s and on. I loved this book because it charts Billy’s discovery of himself and growth into confidence and self-acceptance with humour, tenderness and intelligence. It’s hard to imagine how a straight man, as I believe Irving is, could have put himself so realistically into this first person narrative.