In One Person was published by Simon & Schuster in 2012, and it represents Irving’s most sustained engagement with sexuality and gender — themes that have been present in his work since Garp (which featured a transsexual football player) but are here made the novel’s central subject.
The narrator, William Abbott (“Billy”), is a bisexual writer looking back from old age on a life of desire that never fit the categories available to him. Growing up in a Vermont boarding-school town in the 1950s and 1960s, Billy is attracted to both men and women — and to transgender people who complicate the binary — at a time when such desires were unspeakable. The novel follows his erotic education from adolescence through the devastation of the AIDS crisis (which kills many of his lovers and friends) to the relative openness of the twenty-first century.
Irving treats bisexuality not as a political identity but as a fact of experience — Billy desires who he desires, and the social categories available to describe his desire are always inadequate. The novel’s politics are implicit rather than polemical: by showing a bisexual life lived fully and honestly across six decades of American history, Irving makes the case for acceptance more powerfully than any argument could.
Collecting In One Person
First edition (Simon & Schuster, New York, 2012): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $10–$25
- Signed first edition: $40–$100
- Without jacket: $3–$8