Edmund White has never let any barriers get in his way, not in his public life, not in his writing.

In his upcoming memoir, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir, he chronicles a lifetime of sexual adventures: his furtive explorations with other similarly closeted boys, growing up in the Midwest, his not-unpleasant dalliances with women, in an attempt to “go straight”, his myriad sexual conquests once he had come fully out as a gay man, many of them men who would become the models for characters in his many fine novels. In this new book, White displays his trademark courage for taking on taboo subject matter, here writing so explicitly about sex that one wonders how the reading public in these ridiculously PC, “woke” times will react. But this was Mr. White’s life. And if a writer can’t write about his/her own life, what is he left to write about?

The Loves of My Life is classic Edmund White. In prose that is unrivalled, stacked with a vocabulary that is to be envied, he takes on subjects and stories that might, in some areas of the literary and cultural world, still be considered Verboten; even a chapter intellectualizing BDSM gets down to the nitty-gritty of what makes lovers of pain (giving and receiving) tick. 

A kind of glee infuses this book. It’s as if White is getting a kick out of remembering and sharing his lifetime of sexcapades. Prudes are sure to pass out. Although among White’s legion of admirers, can there be even a single prude? I once saw him read to a large audience made up mostly of blue-haired Brookline/Beacon Hill old ladies (no prudes there!). He also used to have a fan club made up solely of adolescent Japanese girls. so his readership is varied, spread wide as a surprise across the globe. 

White pulls no punches in this memoir, a catalog of the variety of ways in which his lovers, his boyfriends, his tricks and he, himself, derive pleasure. But this memoir isn’t a frivolous pitch; it’s important for the uninformed to know how and why gay men lived and loved. Other than the Marquis de Sade, I can’t think of any writer who has chronicled his/her sex life so candidly (possibly Anais Nin?), without a whiff of shame. No White geisha blushing behind an apologetic fan. Certainly, no gay writer has done this.    

And there should be zero shame. Mr. White is simply being beautifully, unapologetically human in this book. And that, and he, are a delight. Revealing the intimacies of one’s sex life, so unabashedly, so joyously opens one up to vulnerability, in much the same way a customer eases himself down into a barber’s chair for a razor shave. One is left totally exposed.

Each chapter here also presents the reader with sharp, psychological analyses of character, examining the motives behind why gay men pursue who and what they love.  This book is also great fun; I finished it in two sittings, something I never do.

***

The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir
by Edmund White
Bloomsbury; 256 p.

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