John Irving: In One Person

I’m going to begin by telling you about Miss Frost. While I say to everyone that I became a writer because I read a certain novel by Charles Dickens at the formative age of fifteen, the truth is I was younger than that when I first met Miss Frost and imagined having sex with her, and this moment of my sexual awakening also marked the fitful birth of my imagination. We are formed by what we desire. In less than a minute of excited, secretive longing, I desired to become a writer and to have sex with Miss Frost—not necessarily in that order.
I met Miss Frost in a library. 
I like libraries, though I have difficulty pronouncing the word—both the plural and the singular. It seems there are certain words I have considerable trouble pronouncing: nouns, for the most part—people, places, and things that have caused me preternatural excitement, irresolvable conflict, or utter panic. Well, that is the opinion of various voice teachers and speech therapists and psychiatrists who’ve treated me—alas, without success. In elementary school, I was held back a grade due to “severe speech impairments”—an overstatement. I’m now in my late sixties, almost seventy; I’ve ceased to be interested in the cause of my mispronunciations. (Not to put too fine a point on it, but fuck the etiology.)
I don’t even try to say the etiology word, but I can manage to struggle through
a comprehensible mispronunciation of library or libraries—the botched word emerging as an unknown fruit. (“Liberry,” or “liberries,” I say—the way children do.) It’s all the more ironic that my first library was undistinguished. This was the public library in the small town of First Sister, Vermont—a compact red-brick building on the same street where my grandparents lived. I lived in their house on River Street—until I was fifteen, when my mom remarried. My mother met my stepfather in a play. 
The town’s amateur theatrical society was called the First Sister Players; for as far back as I can remember, I saw all the plays in our town’s little theater. My mom was the prompter—if you forgot your lines, she told you what to say. (It being
an amateur theater, there were a lot of forgotten lines.) For years, I thought the prompter was one of the actors—someone mysteriously offstage, and not in cos- tume, but a necessary contributor to the dialogue.
My stepfather was a new actor in the First Sister Players when my mother met him. He had come to town to teach at Favorite River Academy—the almost-prestigious private school, which was then all boys. For much of my young life (most certainly, by the time I was ten or eleven), I must have known that eventually, when I was “old enough,” I would go to the academy. There was a more modern and better-lit library at the prep school, but the public library in the town of First Sister was my first library, and the librarian there was my first librarian. (Incidentally, I’ve never had any trouble saying the librarian word.)

Needless to say, Miss Frost was a more memorable experience than the library. Inexcusably, it was long after meeting her that I learned her first name. Everyone called her Miss Frost, and she seemed to me to be my mom’s age—or a little younger—when I belatedly got my first library card and met her. My aunt, a most imperious person, had told me that Miss Frost “used to be very good-looking,” but it was impossible for me to imagine that Miss Frost could ever have been better-looking than she was when I met her—notwithstanding that, even as a kid, all I did was imagine things. My aunt claimed that the available men in the town used to fall all over themselves when they met Miss Frost. When one of them got up the nerve to introduce himself—to actually tell Miss Frost his name—the then-beautiful librarian would look at him coldly and icily say, “My name is Miss Frost. Never been married, never want to be.”
With that attitude, Miss Frost was still unmarried when I met her; inconceivably, to me, the available men in the town of First Sister had long stopped introducing themselves to her.
excerpt-from-in-one-person  (there you can read a bit more of this wonderful novel)

John Irving reading "In one person":

A personal introduction of In One Person from John Irving.

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.
Billy is not me.  He comes from my imagining what I might have been like if I’d acted on all my earliest impulses as a young teenager.  Most of us don’t ever act on our earliest sexual imaginings.  In fact, most of us would rather forget them—not me.  I think our sympathy for others comes, in part, from our ability to remember our feelings—to be honest about what we felt like doing.  Certainly, sexual tolerance comes from being honest with ourselves about what we have imagined sexually.
Those adults who are always telling children and young adults to abstain from doing everything—well, they must have never had a childhood or an adolescence (or they’ve conveniently forgotten what they were like when they were young).
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.
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—specifically, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre.  She expresses less confidence in Fielding’s Tom Jones, which she also gives Billy.  As she puts it, “If one can count sexual escapades as one result of crushes—”
Later, when Billy has become an avid reader and he returns to the library confessing his crush on an older boy on the wrestling team, Miss Frost—who has earlier given Billy novels by Dickens and Hardy—gives him Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room.  (This is the same night she seduces him.)
“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.”
Later in the novel, Billy realizes this about himself: “I knew that no one person could rescue me from wanting to have sex with men and women.”