The Loves of My Life
A Sex Memoir
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- £13.99
Publisher Description
From the legendary author Edmund White, a stunning, revelatory memoir of a lifetime of gay love and sex.
"In his panoply of sexual encounters, Edmund White's love of sex makes us proud to be human. And the story of his sex life reads like a beautifully crafted, very moving (and very funny!) novel." -John Irving
"A raw, frightening, funny, and beautiful testimony, brimming with transgressive wisdom." -Robert Jones, Jr.
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With his trademark irreverence, White (The Humble Lover) celebrates more than six decades of sex in a candid memoir that doubles as an indispensable work of queer history. A "practicing gay" since age 13, White, now in his 80s, catalogs sexual encounters spanning from pre-Stonewall America to the dawn of online dating. White's partners include hustlers in 1950s Cincinnati, boarding school classmates, a smattering of women intended to "cure" his homosexuality, and a much younger Spaniard he met on the internet and spent a summer with. White has no time for prudes; his prose is redolent with the funk and flavor of male bodies, describing one straight lover—a wrestler—as "deliciously under-washed." There is so much sex, in fact, that the proceedings occasionally threaten to become monotonous, but White saves the day with his poignant portraits of a bygone era. Remembering the 1970s, he writes, "To be carefree, young, loving, promiscuous, and post-religious, free of grim American morality... we would never again enjoy sex in a happy, unworried, arcadian way." Such asides, including one reminding younger generations of the legal advances that "permitted us to put our creative energies into something other than simply enduring," provide the proceedings with welcome gravity. Delightfully raunchy and affecting, this steamy account is full of pleasures.
