My Lives: A Frank, Irreverent, and Funny Memoir by Gay Literary Icon Edmund White

by Edmund White

No one has been more frank, lucid, and entertaining about growing up gay in Middle America than Edmund White. Best known for his autobiographical novels, starting with A Boy's Own Story , White here takes fiction out of his story and delivers the facts of his life in all their shocking and absorbing verity. In My Lives , White shares his enthusiasms and his passions, and he introduces us to his lovers and predilections.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Biography, LGBT, Queer, Biography Memoir, Autobiography

384 pages, Paperback

First published September 5, 2005

About the author

Edmund Valentine White III was an American novelist, memoirist, playwright, biographer, and essayist. He was the recipient of Lambda Literary's Visionary Award, the National Book Foundation's Lifetime Achievement Award, and the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. France made him Chevalier (and later Officier) de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1993.
White was known as a groundbreaking writer of gay literature and a major influence on gay American literature and has been called "the first major queer novelist to champion a new generation of writers."

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an exceptionally well written book and is easy to read. I liked the way the chapters were arranged with a chapter on important groups and individuals. There is a chapter on mother and father, but the first chapter is entitled My Shrinks! Of course White's mother was a psychotherapist and considered White her own personal experiment. His father thought effeminacy started with wearing wristwatches!! There are other chapters on hustlers, women, blondes, Genet (this chapter was fascinating and White's biography of Genet is on my tbr list) and so on.
It is a remarkable chronicle of gay history pre and post AIDS. There are a lot of very graphic sexual descriptions in this book and at times, as White says himself, there is Too Much Information. White is being brutally honest about his body, his obsessions, sexual practices and the men in his life. The S and M interludes are interesting, as the the power relationships in the chapter concerning a master/slave type relationship. I did not feel comfortable with the raionale behind it, but the analysis was interesting. However I wonder how honest it is possible to be when writing in this sort of way. Is there a small part of the mind on the potential audience?
White is also a name dropper and he has plenty to drop; he seems to have met everyone!! Everyone from Foucault to Elton John, photographed by Mapplethorpe and interviewing Truman Capote, White seems to have been everywhere! I would have liked to know more about him in relation to those he met and more about ideas and arguments.

[Paul Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

Edmund White may be the most undislikable man on Planet Earth but as this curious book concluded in a weltering wall-covering ejaculation of thick creamy-textured name-dropping the like of which has hardly ever been attempted before…


I could have written a chapter called My Celebrities. Over the years I've met everyone from Christopher Isherwood to Iris Murdoch, from Joan Didion to John Updike, from Jose Saramago to Joseph Brodsky and Derek Walcott to Nadime Gordimer (just to stay with the Nobel Prize Winners). I have met the Queen of England and the King and Queen of Sweden. I have met Elton John and attended his 50th birthday party. I have slept over at Jasper John's country house in Connecticut and run into Cy Twombly in Crete and at Luxor. I went to three Christmas parties at the 5th Avenue apartment of Charles Mingus. I have eaten a box lunch with Andy Warhol at the Factory.I've had a private tour of the library at Eton and held one of its two Gutenberg Bibles in my hands. I've eaten dinner between Garrison Keillor and Arthur Schlesinger. I interviewed Truman Capote while Robert Mapplethorpe took our picture.

…I began to feel a little queasy and pretty glad it was over. Edmund is truly the Marco Polo of fame.( But – he says – "I don't have much to say about them". Possibly because he's too eager to talk about himself again. )

I closed the book, made myself a cup of tea and met nobody famous that whole evening. And thought that Edmund is indeed the reincarnation of Truman Capote except Truman wrote about everything except himself and then stopped writing and couldn't get started again and Edmund always writes about himself and never stops, ever.
Ed's 5th novel, The Beautiful Room is Empty, is one of my favourite things after raindrops on kittens and bright woolly landrovers and every now and then I think I'll read something else by this splendid writer but each time I stumble away thinking my god… my god… have you seen the size of his ego? It's… HUGE! All his novels are novelisations of his own life and then because that's not enough he writes memoirs – this autobiography My Lives was followed four years later by City Boy which is parts of his life examined in much more detail than the 356 pages of My Lives afforded.

Oh and then he mentions a guy called Stephen Barber whom he calls "my biographer" and this made me burst out laughing – it could be the easiest job in the world, being the biographer of Edmund White. But yes, it exists, "Edmund White : The Burning World" by Stephen Barber.

Well I really liked parts of this book which I read all out of order – My Hustlers and My Master are the best chapters & I think you should read those plus My Shrinks, My Father and My Genet and skip the rest. But please note My Hustlers and My Master are a little racy and contain descriptions of certain activities which widened my understanding of what people have found to be recreational.

And always, and forever, Edmund will reward your attention to his self-fascination with great offhand demolition jobs such as

I despised Lacan, a double-talking charlatan who counted his money while his patients talked and who invented the twenty-minute hour and felt authorised to reduce it to five minutes if the spirit moved him

And sometimes he's just a little too mean

Not only was my mother impulsive, she often sounded stupid to me : self-contradictory, imprecise, or just plain wrong. She stuck close to the nearest cliché, and smiled triumphantly whenever she could locate it. Her egotism and incessant chatter could be truly punishing.

Whew.

My Genet is a fascinating chapter where for the only time EW is completely fascinated by somebody else. He lands the gig of writing the big bio of Jean Genet and he spends 7 years on it. And there are problems :

some of (Genet's) friends had been jailbirds who didn't live long, who if they survived were hard to find, who if found wouldn't talk, or if they talked had to be paid, and weren't to be believed.

After two years of research I'd made almost no progress on the biography. I had no strategy, no goals, no procedures. I had no skills for dismissing hearsay and evaluating competing versions of an event. I lied and told my editors that I was a third of the way done.

There was an elderly guy who was a friend of Genet but who refused to be interviewed. So Edmund made friends with this old guy's friends, then got them to invite the old guy and Edmund to a dinner, then turned the conversation round to Genet and kept the questions & recollections flowing, and all the time Edmund was secretly taping the old guy. Ha! Gotcha. And a little later the guy dies and Edmund thinks now "at least no one else will interview him"!

Mean, haughty, self-loathing, self-satisfied, humiliatingly concupiscient, murderously , terminally cultured, generous, celebratory, incisive, endearing, exasperating, all these things are Edmund, and many other things too, one could go on, and if one was Edmund himself, one would.

[George Ilsley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Edmund White died recently, at the age of 85, which prompted me to pick up "My Lives," a memoir. I'm glad I did.

Some of White's recent novels I have found disappointing, but this memoir was (mostly) very engaging. There was one section (I won't say which one) that was too much for this sensitive reader.

There is no chapter list or index, so it it hard to locate the sections. It starts with "My Shrinks" and also covers topics such as "My Friends" and "My Europe". I especially enjoyed "My Genet" which discusses how writing the biography of Jean Genet consumed — and transformed — White's life.

Many times while working my way through this book, I thought, "This is my favourite book of Edmund White's!"

[Wendell · Rating 3 out of 5]

At a certain juncture in My Lives, Edmund White jokes that the reader must certainly be saying to himself, “TMI! Too much information!” White is, at that point, talking in extravagant detail about his sex life—but then it’s something of a challenge to find a moment in My Lives when he isn’t talking about his sex life, or other people’s, or describing his partners’ physical endowments with the appraising eye of the steer judge at the county fair. When the book is done, the feeling one is left with, above all others, is a kind of disorientation: How is it that a writer with White’s career, talent, and success has so little else to talk about? Edmund White is nearly twenty years older than I am, and that may explain a great deal. He was already a mature man when I came out in 1976, had already published two novels (though his real masterpieces, A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, and his book of stories, Skinned Alive were still before him), had already been through his early attempts to cure himself of homosexuality, his first important loves. In the rapid-fire social evolutions and revolutions between White’s birth and today, twenty years is a very long time, indeed; so I have no difficulty imagining that questions of sex and desire were defining for White in ways that they were not for me. As I say, that may explain a lot, but I’m not sure it fully explains the obsessive turning over and over of sexual conquests and (especially) sexual failures that characterizes My Lives. In fact, White’s revelations seems calculated to produce humiliation (his own: after a certain number of repetitions, his comments about being fat and underendowed solicit disgust rather than sympathy or understanding) and, simultaneously, to force the reader into a nonconsensual S&M relationship. I suppose you’ve really hit the big time if you can get HarperCollins to help you play dominance and submission, but My Lives is sad when it most wants to be provocative, tawdry when it most wants to elucidate. There’s a great deal I’d liked to have learned from Edmund White, but incessant details about phone sex, late-night cruising, failed three-ways, men who didn’t love him, men he didn’t love, the terrible tragedy of not being young and muscular anymore ... those weren't on my list. In fact, White’s sex life is what makes him exactly like everybody else; I bought the book because I was interested in reading about how he was different.

[David Gallagher · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've always considered autobiographies to be the most difficult genre one can write. Because to write an autobiography you have to become a viewer to your own life - an outsider. You have to have an objective outlook, but, at the same time, you have to be as subjective as possible because a simple biographer can be objective, whereas an autobiographer is not allowed to do that.

My partner read this book before I did, and read passages to me from it. When he finished reading it, I started it. Unlike Edmund White (and my partner), I was born in the mid 1980's - some years after the AIDS outbreak and everything that came with it. White struggled a lot with his sexuality, with his need to belong, with not feeling "good enough" in order to be loved.

This book made me feel very polarized. There are many things in My Lives that made me sympathize with White - that made me admire him, that made me want to have experienced as well. But there are also things in the book that made me almost dislike him - things I didn't necessarily "get" or could "forgive" or "approve of." Call me naive, but I don't understand how he could develop feelings of desire for women, or how little his life partner (Michael Carroll) is mentioned and how guilt-free he cheats on him (even if Carroll was aware and even allowing it to happen). White, understandably, is afraid of growing old and dreads rejection more than anything, but he sometimes seems so...materialistic. He cares about outer looks, he falls in love and desires so many men you stop counting; and maybe it's the time gap dividing our generations, but I can't understand that sometimes. Or, if I can, I tend to frown upon it. Maybe inexcusably.

The language is of course magnificent - White can manipulate language so beautifully, so effortlessly. His words flow on the page, they have cohesion and ebullience. And the detail in which he recalls events and people is admirable. I am not a fan of biographies (they tend to tire me, and I care about the work rather than the person behind it), but this reads as an exquisite novel, and it never allows you to feel bored by the memoirs in it. And plus, reading about his sexual encounters and experiences can be irrevocably hot.

[Eric Byrd · Rating 4 out of 5]

The consuming readability of this autobiography, coming as it does after a trilogy of some of the most revealing autobiographical fiction in American literature, is a testament to White's skill as a storyteller. We've heard most of these stories before, but they're still fascinating, and White tells them in a new way: the slower, more dramatized pace of the novels is replaced here with a fast, breezy, talky narrative, gossipy sketches and summaries, swiftly branching yarns. I just re-read the chapter "My Mother" and the stories of her Texas roots struck me as if I hadn't already known them for years. A tour de force.

[Jack · Rating 2 out of 5]

Autobiography has the inherent danger of self-indulgence, and to my mind, White has hit the wall. This most remarkable writer, who helped shape modern gay literature, here spools endless tales of his family, his blondes, his hustlers, and a few other less than riveting topics. His elegance as a writer cannot really mask the shallow narcissism of this endless introspection. Writers I admire, such as Britain's Alan Hollinghurst,raved about this volume, so I may simply have missed the boat. But I wouldn't tell anyone to run down the pier after this one.

[Chris · Rating 2 out of 5]

What I learned from this book is that if a 60-something year old man falls in love with his sadomasochistic prostitute and/or paid boyfriend he should keep it to himself.

[Krodì80 · Rating 5 out of 5]

MASTER DI STILE

Edmund White mette insieme una gustosa ed irriverente autobiografia, incastrando diversi 'macrocosmi' del suo nutrito percorso esperienziale e personale. Un lavoro anarchico, intensamente piacevole e di qualità letteraria sopraffina, in cui le tante vite e le infaticabili avventure del nostro vengono fluidamente snocciolate nei diversi capitoli: I miei analisti, Le mie marchette, Il mio master, I miei biondi, Le mie donne, Mio padre, fra gli altri. E Il mio Genet: un grande contributo, infatti, alla conoscenza e valorizzazione dell'opera e della personalità del superbo scrittore d'Oltralpe è scaturito dalla singolare penna di Edmund White, che, attraverso ricerche e peripezie pluriennali, ha elaborato una densa e scrupolosa biografia, poi vincitrice del National Book Critics Circle Award (ed. It. Ladro di stile). White, sottile e spudorato romanziere, professore, critico letterario e indefesso viaggiatore, in My lives non ci risparmia dettagli e aneddoti fra i più piccanti e sovversivi che uno possa immaginare - o tollerare. Confessioni o desideri che non ci sogneremmo di rivelare neppure al nostro più fido partner, qui sono forgiati nero su bianco a imperitura memoria. Ma con una genuina franchezza, una statura letteraria, e un così delizioso acume che a Edmund si perdona anche l'eccesso, imprevedibile e chiassosamente incantevole.

[James Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author's willingness to share his most intimate feelings is present in every section of this impressive biography. The stories of his lives, whether as a boy trying to deal with a distant father or a man sharing his body and mind with other men, contain and contrast emotions that become palpable for the reader. Can the unique experiences of a boy from the Midwest become universal for his readers whether gay or straight? Do his lives in Paris or in leather seem fantasies or real stories told in a fantastic fictional shade? I am not sure, but the beauty and strength of Edmund White's writing suggests the possibility of real lives relived through the word. This reader found that is what he wants from a writer and his expectations were met and more by the lives committed to memory and shared with the world in this astonishing autobiography.

[Bobparr · Rating 2 out of 5]

(Abbandonato)
Recuperato da commenti trovato in rete, non avevo inteso il taglio cosi' pesantemente omosex di queste pagine. Di linguaggio ben scelto, questa autobiografia - fino a che si riesce a sopravvivere al suo odore mieloso e ai suoi squallidi panorami umani - da' anche qualche gioia all'intelletto. Sopraffatto dal leggere inutilmente di sesso, l'ho senza cruccio abbandonato a momenti dove il tempo dedicato alla lettura sarà meno importante. Curiosa, ad ogni modo, l'attenzione per gli abbigliamenti d'epoca. A leggere di certi ambienti, sono segretamente felice di non essere nato in USA.

[Andy White · Rating 4 out of 5]

A moving, beautifully written memoir. Edmund White's works have a powerful mixture of beauty and ugliness when looking at life. I highly recommend this book with the recommendation that you become familiar with some of his earlier works first. I also caution that this book might be too graphic for those that prefer more sanitized reads. I enjoyed this book immensely.

[Paulo Santos · Rating 4 out of 5]

I always enjoyed reading autobiographical literature, like memoirs, correspondence, etc; it gives one a most vivid sense not only of the author's personality and ideas but also of his time and contemporaries, someone a History nerd like me finds always fascinating. I hadn't read much by Edmund White - I liked Skinned Alive, but found A Boy's Own Story somewhat dull - but recently I was reminded of him when I read Everyone is Watching, where he is one of the characters, then there was an article about him in the new York Times, where he was praised by several writers I admire, like Garth Greenwell, Edouard Louis and Pajtim Statovci, so I ordered My Lives to give it a try.

I was not disappointed - it's a very interesting book, extremely well written, organised not chronologically but by themes, describing the life and development of an intelligent man through most interesting times. The chapters about his parents, his shrinks and Europe are five star writing; I don't share his admiration for Genet, who I always considered an overrated writer and a disagreeable character, and I found his opinions on women somewhat silly, even if I liked the candour with which he states them. As for his sex life, when at a certain point he writes: "I can imagine some of my friends reading this and muttering, 'TMI - Too Much Information', or 'Are we to be spared nothing? Must we have every detail about these tiresome senile shenanigans?'", I thought: "this is exactly what I'm feeling!". But then the simple fact that he wrote this in such an ironic self deprecating way reconciled me with the narrative, even if sometimes so detailed and graphic that bordered on boring. But I also found it refreshing to see someone writing about subjects usually considered too scabrous to be approached by "serious" writers in such a candid way, and never distasteful. White speaks about gay sex, gender issues or prostitution in a most common-sensical way, never bothering with the political correctness and puritanism that haunt these issues in the present time, so dishearteningly dominated by Byzantine discourses of identity theories and such. Just for that, he deserves my praise.

[John David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading Edmund White, perhaps one of the most heralded gay American writers today, can be a jarring experience. Full of lurid sexual exploits, endless name-dropping of intellectuals with whom he was acquainted, and just for good measure, countless vignettes from the history of French literature, this volume of his autobiography makes for vertiginous reading. In fact, this mixture of a highly personal life with the reflections and insights of an academic make it very much like some of his later fiction (specifically "The Married Man").

But we learn plenty of White's earlier life as well, almost as if White is sitting on the therapist's couch "typing" to a therapeutic word processor. This may not be surprising, since we learn that his mother is a psychologist and his father is a loud, abusive drunk. Throughout the entire arc of his life, he reveals to us a deeply wounded, desperate ego. Many may believe that his celerity to tell us about the personal details of his life is a transparent attempt to offset his fragile personality. It is not an unwarranted conclusion. But by the end of the book, it became clear that he was not trying to account for anything in his past. Rather, after a life full of rejection, one more is but a drop in the ocean. I have seen interviews with him, and his discomfort and unease with his physical appearance are visible in his general mien.

Structurally speaking, this biography is an interesting one. While most are broken down into rough chronological chunks, these chapter divisions are grouped by interests or experiences, from the banal to the more explicit: a few include "My Women," "My Genet," and "My Blondes." In almost all of these, he seems to want to showcase his cynicism and intellectual seclusion. But, needless to say, the innocence which overflowed like milk and honey in "The Beautiful Room Is Empty" runs bone-dry here.

Ultimately, I cannot recommend this, except perhaps for the odd datum about Genet's masochism or Comte de Lautréamont's uncommonly early death. White is at his best in his biographical writing. His book on Genet is a wonderful psychological portrait, and will continue to serve as a sourcebook for both his life and his work. White's autobiographical writing, at least for me, contains a bit too much treacle and self-loathing.

[R.J. Gilmour · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first Edmund White's Autobiography, My Lives, has proven a difficult book to read. White, a gay male writer who has written important gay novels has written an autobiography that places his own sense of self, his own ego squarely in the center. Given the information he presents in his autobiography (it is often painfully private) he has led a fascinating life crossing the paths of the majority of "players" and persons of importance in the twentieth-century. While this should make for interesting reading how White handles it makes readers acutely aware of the author himself and his constant desire to remain the center of attention. While not surprising in an autobiography White's writing style and egoism speak about the privileges of whiteness and class rather than any self-analytical awareness about who he is or what his life has created. As a medium autobiographies are much more interesting when written in a memoir-mode. In the end it may simply be that White's literary style is like his subject, too invested in its own playfulness rather than any desire to craft interesting narratives. White spends endless pages describing the physical characteristics of his muses, the attributes of desire he felt for young men, hustlers and lovers and yet never seems to raise these descriptions to any kind of interesting speculation about the relationship between these descriptions and who he is. White seems to revel in a cocoon of self-aggrandizement which is sometimes based on his own undesirability. Yet his descriptions seem disingenious. More the work of child fascinated with his own capacity to create illusions than an adult seeking to have a discussion about the trajectory of his life. A strange combination to say the least, that is cloaked in disingenuinity that celebrates literary slight of hand rather than insight into identity or self. Reading White's autobiography makes me acutely aware of the relationship between time, place, space, identity, self and reading. Sometimes texts speak to readers in ways that they would never would at other times. Maybe my antipathy to White's style, his prose and his subject is simply a product of my own time and place. Reading fiction is so much like appreciating art, dependent upon the time, place, space and identity of the reader. It can be so subjective.

[Meridith · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this up mid-way through White's trilogy of novels and much of the material about his parents and his many psychotherapists (how can anyone resist an autobiography that starts with a chapter entitled, My Shrinks?) was familiar having been very thinly veiled in A Boy's Own Life. Turns out I prefer the fictionalized version of these childhood events. As far as the voyeuristic thrill of White's recounting of his budding sexuality in his novels, in the chapter, My Hustlers, the shenanigans are much more explicit but tempered by a coldness. White's actual sex life, much celebrated, seems a bit tawdry and sad as it is bound to role-playing and sadism he directly traces back to his difficult relationship with his father. One chapter really makes this book stand out brilliantly, though, for anyone interested in literary gossip. My Europe is chock full of stories concerning White's expatriate circle in Paris--Foucault on a bad trip, Sontag reacting to a perceived fictional snub, her son's plot to attack White with a cat'o nine tails at an S&M party, and much more. I'll never forget the French post-modernists interpretation of what would become the AIDS epidemic. Fantastic.

[Becc · Rating 1 out of 5]

I couldn't get past the first few chapters of this. I've enjoyed his other work - much of it based on his own life, I understand - so thought this would be good too, but this one was just too much self-indulgence.

This is an accusation I've never leveled at any of his work prior to now, and there's little I was reading in this that wasn't at least briefly covered in his semi-autobiographical fiction - I felt like I knew these people already from what I've read of his work previously - so what's the thing that made this so patently unbearable? I think it's the way he's dissected his life into chapters divided by subject ("My Mother", "My Father", "My Shrinks"...) and the way in which this systematic analysis of one thing after another leaves no room for the reader to make a reading of their own -- is more essay than story.

I suppose we all reflect on our lives in ways similar to this in order to make sense of our identity, but... not to this extent, not in a piece of writing intended for an audience of others. Just too much.

[Joseph · Rating 3 out of 5]

i'm stuck between two and three stars for the book.

some parts were beautifully written and captivating. i think that white has captured an element regarding gay sexual relationships that no other author has been able to put into words. he's also got great insight into certain other elements: i.e. cultural, gender, sociopolitical.
that being said . . .

some parts could have been taken out of the book completely. i found myself reading some chapters and was wondering, "why am i reading this? why does this man insist on name-dropping? does this really say something about his life or is it simply drivel?" other topics i felt could have been expanded upon such as his friends. at times i felt that i was reading just to finish the book.

i'm conflicted. i'm sad because the book at times missed the mark, on the other hand, though, i'm happy i read a book that chronicled an amazing life.

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

This memoir really helped me solidify Edmund's personal friendships and acquaintances with the characters of his novels. Having read the memoir City Boy, I was able to put them both together as comprehensive in how is life's observances, actions, and relationships influenced his work. Edmund is the king of romanticizing not only the bohemian untold stories of homosexual love, lust, and conquest of the 50's and 60's but is a writer whose relationships (be them sexually fleeting or lasting) are identifiable with every reader in mind. Where City Boy depicts life in the 60's and 70's as a gay man, My Lives depicts his life per acquaintance. Chapters titled "My Mother", "My Genet" and "My Blondes" all focus on that exact topic/title and explain how important each subject to his personal life which in turn explains the thinking behind much of his work, specifically the creation of his characters. This memoir is an excellent reflection.

[Nathan Hauenstein · Rating 3 out of 5]

In many ways I found this book to be flawed. This had to do with the structure of the text which did not really fully allow for any clear total picture of White's life to develop, because the way in which each of the chapters that focused on a particular subject, sometimes minuscule and sometimes too broad. This text oscillated between his parents, psychoanalysis, gratuitous detail about his sex life (in a particularly uninteresting fashion), but in such a way that it avoided the intrusion of these things into one another (o.k., Bruce Wayne).

At times the writing felt lazy and self-indulgent.
I've read some of White's other work, which was more pointed and cohesive, and I feel that throughout the text White remained likable.
It wasn't awful though, there were a few enjoyable parts and particularly thoughtful ruminations.

[Lianne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this book up at a used book sale. I had heard of Edmund White as the author of "A Boy's Life" but knew nothing about him. He has been very prolific and must now be in his late 60's or early 70's. He has lived in London, Paris and Italy as well as in New York. His gay identity is the main topic of his memoir. Without doubt, he is a lucid and elegant writer. This memoir is a no-holds barred, graphic portrayal of his sexual experiences--both emotional and physical. He has known many famous writers and includes revealing detail about them as well--namely Genet, Truman Capote, and many others. If you are interested in bohemian literary history you would enjoy this book. However, it is not for the judgmental or faint of heart.

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Liked being in the web of this person for a month or so. Made art seem more relevant cause of how I could imagine these literary characters moving through the world and being inspired and depending on one another's evolving vocabulary. Some quotes I liked:

Toward the end of his life Foucalt spoke more and more of the value of friendship. If there was no God to whom we were accountable, then if we behaved morally we did so in order to turn our lives into beautiful , admirable examples. And of all the jewels in our diadem none glowed more brightly than friendship.

All of us who went to the Miller School have no stage fright (thanks to endless creative dramatioc classes), no shyness, no sense of rivalry nor the conviction that another person's gain is our loss.

[Skip · Rating 4 out of 5]

Typical White.
Witty, worldly and full of sex. Though the sex never really felt pornographic or anything....I think....
But maybe that's the wonderful thing about memoir and looking back: You get a real sense of the love, pain, maturity – and in the end – folks who are flawed, not necessariy loveable, but all pretty human.

And all that slave/master stuff was great. I couldn't put it down.

I loved lines like this description of a leather shop White and T Visited. "Inside, everything smelled of leather, and black jackets and chaps and whips hung thickly from the ceiling like sleeping bats."

And who was T?

[Chris Garcia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is fascinating because Edmund White is so frank and confessional, and he is far from your stereotypical homosexual. I mean, you're not going to find an example of him on prime time TV. I suppose you could think of him as a younger, neurotic, middle-class Gore Vidal. So nothing like Gore Vidal. Well, they're both gay intellectuals.

I thoroughly enjoyed the chapter on his mother. It amazes me that he is able to draw a portrait of such a monstrous, miserable person, who is his mother, without being sentimental.

For those of you who are titillated by the ghastly details of others' kinky sex lives, this book is for you. Everybody else, brace yourselves. E.W. does not hold back.

[Brandon Judell · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you are a fan of White's novels (e.g. A Boy's Own Story), this is a must read. But if you are gay, literary, been a live for a few decades, or tend to interact with humans, this tome is also highly recommended. Please be forewarned: he does share a bit much about his sexual peccadillos, and in such detail in certain sections that you'll feel like virgin by comparison. But in all in all, it's a life affirming charmer bristling with affectionate neuroses.

[Miguel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely love Edmund White's books, and this is one of my favourites. It is a very original autobiography, arranged by themes and not chronologically as usual. White's novels have always been semi-autobiographical, and this memoir kind of fills the blanks and clear things up. Always with humour, style, and a candid honesty that is never naïve or ingénue.

[Delyse Richards · Rating 3 out of 5]

I cant say I enjoyed being a voyeur into this author's most intimate sexual shenanigans. I rather hope his exploits are not the norm in gay relationships. However his story is very sad and he has written it very well, but I found it somewhat disturbing.

[Takoyaki · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is hands down the best book I read in 2006.

[Cherie · Rating 3 out of 5]

B+ Very interesting and captivating story about growing up and trying to cure himself of being gay, but later enjoying it; great sex stories; sometimes things can go on too long

[katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was scandalized! But then again I'm prudish sort of lady.