EXCERPT: 'In One Person' by John Irving

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 . . .

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 costume, 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.

From "In One Person" by John Irving. Copyright © 2012 by John Irving, published by Simon & Schuster.