I read John Irving’s book, The World According to Garp what seems like a hundred years ago. I was 12. I had to sneak to read it – as I did many things that I read in those days – because my mother felt the story was “too old” for me. She was right of course, but for the wrong reasons. She didn’t want me to read it because of the sexual references. What I know now was that I was far to young then to “get” the themes in the story. I just wanted to read it because “everyone else” had in my circle of friends, or so they said.

I never did read Irving’s next book, The Hotel New Hampshire. It came out during my sophomore year in high school. Though I was still an avid reader, I had a job and activities and homework and on and on. There just wasn’t time. Looking back now, perhaps that’s the one I should have read.

By the time Irving’s next bestselling novel was released in 1985, The Cider House Rules, I was in the Army. I had a bit more time to read then, actually, than I had in high school and I remember devouring it over a couple of very late nights. I also recall picking it up again a couple of years later – for very personal reasons – and re-reading it. The story hit very close to home for me.

I left the Army in 1988, went Guard and went to college. I got married in 1990 and, over time we bought a house, started a family and I finished school while working full time. I forgot all about John Irving and, in all honesty, I never picked up another one of his books…until now.

John’s latest book, In One Person, was published in early May by Simon & Schuster. When I first heard about it, I literally had to search my memory for what he had previously written. It had been roughly 25 years since I’d given his work a thought. I received this book a couple of weeks ago. After scanning the reviews, I couldn’t wait to read it. Unfortunately, life – like life for the characters in Irving’s stories – has a way of getting in the way. I finally was able to pick it up this past Thursday evening and I dived in. I hoped to finish it over the weekend but, again, life interfered.

I’m about half way or so though the story of the lead/protagonist, Bill. It’s quite a tale told in the 1st person beginning with his formative years as a teenager. Irving has an incredible talent for getting inside a characters head and writing from his point of view. In the beginning, I felt like I was seeing everything through young Billy’s eyes. As Billy matures and becomes a man, that feeling doesn’t change. He’s skillfully depicted and he’ll draw you right into his story.

John Irving is unapologetic for the sexual nature and sexual preferences of his characters. In fact, let me just present some of his thinking to you in his own words:

“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.

He writes from that perspective.  In this book, Bill is bisexual and he is decidedly open about it, just as Irving is open about why he writes as he does. Bill has “sex” (so to speak, in a manner…when you read it, you’ll understand) at a young age with a male to female transsexual who is the librarian in his small hometown, First Sister, Vermont.  His journey of self discovery and self acceptance continues along a twisted path from that point. A constant theme in his story is “crushes on the wrong people” (men and transsexuals). It’s actually the title of chapter 2.

This novel has been called “political” by many. It’s about love, sex, and gender and the blurring of gender lines and everything in between, from what I’ve seen in just the first 200 pages. If that makes it political, so be it. I’m enjoying the story and I’m seeing much of myself and many of the men and women I know reflected in it. Irving writes from what he knows and he knows that we’re all sexual beings on a continuum between gay/lesbian and straight and that most of us don’t fall at one extreme end or the other but somewhere in between.