In One Person

In One Person is a novel by the American writer John Irving, published on 8 May 2012 and his thirteenth since 1968.

The book is narrated by Billy Abbott, a bisexual novelist, who tells the story of his life across more than half a century. It begins with him as a schoolboy in Vermont, developing crushes on people he is not supposed to want: a boy at school, an older woman, a man in the town library and his mother's second husband. He grows up through the theatre and the small towns of New England, and the novel follows the people who made him, including a stepfather who does not know what to make of him and friends who do not survive the years in which the epidemic came. Irving has said the idea of writing about a bisexual character came to him while he was thinking about what if, and the book treats a long life as a series of revelations rather than as a single coming out.

Irving's earlier novels also return to New England and to people who do not fit the town they live in, and this one puts that subject at the centre of the story.