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• Edmund White is gay. If you’re not familiar with him—and I wasn’t until recently—this is the first thing you’ll notice about him in his memoir My Lives. You’ll notice other things, too: his name-dropping, over-sharing, and devout hedonism. These traits are unavoidable in the context of White’s interesting life, described in vivid, conversational prose.Rather than walking through his life from birth to present, White gives us thematic chapters. This format gives us more insight into White’s view of himself than a timeline-bound format. For example, the first chapter concerns his shrinks from childhood through adulthood. The chapter’s prominence suggests that he learned introspection early and kept up the practice. His particular introspection was closely tied to his own homosexuality, which his therapists saw as sick. Though he would later embrace “the gay,” he agreed with his therapists then, and his strongly self-critical streak shows itself through White’s book and life.And just as with the first chapter, the second (“My Father”) and third (“My Mother”) outline patterns—difficulty with ’50s-style masculinity and more-friendly-than-maternal interactions with women—that persist through later chapters. These themes build upon each other, culminating in the much-foreshadowed final chapter, “My Friends,” where White waxes about a series of more and less famous friends, representing the capstone of life lived by a boy who just wants to be noticed, irrespective of love or hate.White does manage to elide portions of his life that he would rather not share, but he doesn’t appear to be holding much back. He goes into very precise detail about gay experiences. From sexually-charged childhood games to paying for tricks (and being paid for being one), the reader gets an awful lot of dirt on the author. (Depending on one’s curiosity, proclivity, or dignity, the chapter on White’s year-long relationship with a much younger S&M master should be either devoured or avoided with relish.)My Lives depicts the absorbing path of a gay man who lived through the closeted 1950s, the free-spirited but bourgeois modern gay life, and every libidinous period in between. If that’s the sort of thing that interests you, then White’s book is for you.

  4.00 out of 5

  nscardon

• 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.

  3.00 out of 5

  kant1066

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