My Lives: An Autobiography - Hardcover

White, Edmund

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0066213975 ISBN 13: 9780066213972

Publisher: Ecco, 2006

Synopsis

No one has been more frank, lucid, rueful 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.

From an adolescence in the 1950s, an era that tried to "cure his homosexuality" but found him "unsalvageable," he emerged into a 1960s society that redesignated his orientation as "acceptable (nearly)." He describes a life touched by psychotherapy in every decade, starting with his flamboyant and demanding therapist mother, who considered him her own personal test case -- and personal escort to cocktail lounges after her divorce. His father thought that even wearing a wristwatch was effeminate, though custodial visits to Dad in Cincinnati inadvertently initiated White into the culture of "hustlers and johns" that changed his life.

In My Lives, White shares his enthusiasms and his passions -- for Paris, for London, for Jean Genet -- and introduces us to his lovers and predilections, past and present. "Now that I'm sixty-five," writes White, "I think this is a good moment to write a memoir. . . . Sixty-five is the right time for casting a backward glance, while one is still fully engaged in one's life."

About this title

About the Author

Edmund White is the author of the novels Fanny: A Fiction, A Boy's Own Story, The Farewell Symphony, and The Married Man; a biography of Jean Genet; a study of Marcel Proust; and, most recently, a memoir, My Lives. Having lived in Paris for many years, he has now settled in New York, and he teaches at Princeton University.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. White—a prolific essayist, novelist, biographer (of Proust and Genet), travel writer, critic and all-around man of letters—has mined the events and circumstances of his own life frequently and vividly, and has been the subject of two biographies. Wisely, he has not attempted a straightforward autobiography, but instead a collection of essays or meditations, beginning, tellingly, with "My Shrinks," an introduction to his early struggles with homosexuality and later with other problems; the psychoanalytic process led him to "the conviction that everyone is worth years and years of intense scrutiny—not a bad credo for a novelist." Essays on White's divorced parents—his conservative Republican father and hard-working, indulgent mother—are followed by "My Hustlers," which features the kind of candid writing about sex and relationships that has made White a gay icon. His close women friends aren't neglected, nor is the expatriate life he has often described before, including his friendship with French philosopher Michel Foucault. White delivers more on sex than any other subject (which will please many of his fans), but there's plenty more in these gracefully written pieces to engage the intellect, the emotions and even that part of us that responds to name-dropping. For a Princeton professor, White gets around. Photos. (Apr. 1)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Ecco
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0066213975
• ISBN 13: 9780066213972
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368