John Irving on His Bisexual Billy Abbott

If I were Charlie Rose, next month I'd host a show with novelists John Irving and Pat Barker so they could discuss bisexuality in literature, interrupting each other with, "Well, my bi Billy..." "But MY bi Billy..." Surely readers remember WWI switchhitter Billy Prior's vivid seduction of a French farmboy in Barker's Booker Prize winner The Ghost Road. Coming on May 8 is Billy Abbott, the first person narrator of Irving's 13th novel, In One Person [Kindle], who says

"If you were, like me, at an all-boys' boarding school in the fall of 1960, you felt utterly alone—you trusted no one, least of all another boy your age—and you loathed yourself. I'd always been lonely, but self-hatred is worse than loneliness."

Hear more in the clip above. Or watch this interview in which Irving says, "Sexual outsiders and misfits know better who they are, because they're always being judged by the mainstream."