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A Sex Memoir
by Edmund White
From the legendary author Edmund White, a stunning, revelatory memoir of a lifetime of gay love and sex.
I'm at an age when writers are supposed to say finally what mattered most to them-for me it would be thousands of sex partners.
The 85-year-old "paterfamilias of queer literature" (New York Times) recounts the sixty-plus years of sexual escapades that have inspired his many masterpieces. He explores the sex he had with other closeted boys of the 50s Midwest, with women as a young man trying to be straight, the sex he's paid for and been paid for, sex during the Stonewall and HIV eras, and in the age of the apps. Through tales of transactional sex, mutual admiration, open relationships, domination, submission, love, and loss, he paints an indelible portrait of queer history in America and abroad in a way only someone who has lived through it can.
Written with White's signature honesty, irreverence, and wit, The Loves of My Life is the culmination of a legend's life and work, a delightful and moving tour of over seventy years of being unabashedly gay and in love with love in all its forms.
"With his trademark irreverence, White celebrates more than six decades of sex in a candid memoir that doubles as an indispensable work of queer history...Delightfully raunchy and affecting, this steamy account is full of pleasures." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"In crisply written episodes laced with a wry sense of humor about his own shortcomings and social foibles, White remains a talented, carnally flagrant raconteur whose memoir thumps with the palpably racing heartbeat of life, sex, love, and unbridled desire. An irreverent and unapologetically provocative scrapbook of an aging author's sex life." ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"White relates encounters in vivid detail, as if glorying in their mundanity, but existential truths nonetheless rise to the surface: being gay is what allowed him to survive his upbringing; the victory of Stonewall 'permitted us to put our creative energies into something other than simply enduring.' Character portraits emerge too, often in a sole sentence, especially, of course, of the author himself, and his life in love and writing." ―Booklist
"Exhaustively wonderful. An unflinching, romantic, and generous climax by a bright star in our literary constellation. The gayest book ever written." ―Henry Hoke, author of Open Throat
"One of the patron saints of queer literature, a new book from Edmund White is always a cause for celebration. The Loves of My Life feels like the culmination of a profound wisdom - wry, hilarious, moving, and brilliantly unreserved. This litany of lovers becomes a sort of community in itself, full of vitality and difference. White is still breaking taboos in the most joyous and virtuoso style." ―Seán Hewitt, author of All Down Darkness Wide
This information about The Loves of My Life was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Born in 1940, Edmund White grew up in Chicago, Illinois. He studied Chinese at the University of Michigan, graduating in 1962. From 1983 to 1990 White lived in France; France made him Chevalier (and later Officier) de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1993. Since 1999 he has been a professor at Princeton University.
White is the author of many novels, including A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, The Farewell Symphony, and A Previous Life. His nonfiction includes City Boy, Inside a Pearl, The Unpunished Vice, and other memoirs; The Flâneur, about Paris; and literary biographies and essays. He was named the 2018 winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction and received the 2019 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the ...
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