IAmerican novelist and critic Edmund White's sixth memoir explores how universal decency about sex exists alongside the fact that it's always on our minds. It says that there is. With the casual wisdom that runs throughout the book, White writes that sex is a “language that people speak” that is “communal and isolating at the same time.” Copying the vocabulary of sex, particularly sex between men, was White's lifelong literary project, most famously in his 1982 semi-autobiographical novel A Boy's Own Story. Loves of My Life approaches this task with refreshing candor. The result is an erotic novel that charts the changing sexual mores and mores of gay life over seven decades, from “the repression of the 1950s” to “the 2020s' raging storm against anything labeled 'woke.'” Something like a tick yearbook was completed.
At the beginning of his memoir, White confesses that he had been “bitten” by sexual urges since he was 10 years old, even though he had a “small penis.” The writer's early moments of undress are classic self-satire and part of his meanness. An obsessive desire to make oneself the butt of jokes. It's one of many sharp digressions on the workings of life writing, the sleight of hand of self-novel, the act of a “literary daredevil,” which makes him consistently endearing and endearing here. He admits that this makes him a good storyteller. The book's funniest moments come in the conversations White himself delivers as a delightfully dry and “strangely smart” young man. In one scene, he concocts a grand story about a promiscuous queer classmate to gauge the receptivity of a seemingly straight potential lover. Noticing the excitement in the audience, he said: I'm a cocksucker. ”
The memoir's unabashed opening sets the tone and serves as a kind of inoculation, preparing potentially scandalized readers for what's to come. Immediately after that, we come across a list of pros and cons of hiring men for sex. Denim jeans with erotic urine stains. and “hillbilly hustlers” who had complex sexual norms (they felt that receiving oral sex from another man did not make them “homo”, because “sucking a man's cock is only for queers and girls”). (That's because “only”). These details accumulate in some 200 pages, and they combine to create a pointillist canvas of gay desire and male sexuality in its many paradoxes and contradictions.
But The Loves of My Life is far more textured and colorful than its charming subtitle (“A Sex Memoir”) would lead us to believe. It's part writer's memoir, part rumination on the craft, and it complements rather than contradicts the aficionado's themes. For White, the act of writing is both an expression of desire (“sex is better on the page”) and a means to a deeper understanding of our private sexuality. White wrote his first novel about gay sex when he was a closeted teenager, he says. It was as if he needed to “imagine being gay first before doing anything about it.” It is a wonderful idea that the formation of self-identity is a kind of artistic act.
White's whistleblowing about his own novels, his journey from “experimental books” to “transparent and realistic” autobiographical novels, is more about the novelist's enduring obsession with writing about love. It is connected to deep questions. In one of the memoir's most elaborate metaphors, White asks whether passionate love is “a kind of paranoia, a way of tying disparate events together.” He often frames his insights this way, either as speculation or in the form of a question. This speculative approach is different from hedging or ex-ante volatility. On the contrary, it feels like it's beneficial. Love may be mysterious, but if you approach it with curiosity, you can sometimes catch a glimpse of its true meaning.
Loves of My Life is not arranged chronologically. Like dreamily tinkering with a radio dial, White tunes back and forth between different years, a decision because “desire doesn't follow a timetable.” If that justification feels flimsy, when we masturbate, “we skip decades and flash from one memory to another,” without regard to narrative order. , its validity is further strengthened by the observation that people pursue their desires wherever they go. Instead, the book consists of chapters on broad themes (“Heterosexual Sex'', “Sadomasochism''), in which he paraphrases and knits together fragments of theory. Sadomasochism, for example, is something we first embrace as babies “because we need to eroticize the helplessness we feel in order to cope with it” — queer, anyway. According to scholar Leo Bersani.
Other chapters are named after ex-lovers, and all but one are male. In “Becky,” White delicately describes her ill-fated heterosexual pursuits at age 25, when she was “going through therapy to go straight.” The portraits of these characters are given depth thanks to his talent for capturing the essence of the various predicaments of past partners (his belief that writing should be done with “a scalpel, not a brush”) Despite the view, it is certainly an act of empathy). White's first “husband”, Stan, who had been tied up in a drug-fueled group before finding AA, was anxious and confused, “so consumed with anxiety that he couldn't follow a conversation.” ” He is a man. This is an effective and striking depiction of depression, and is consistent with the portrait White later painted of his own father. The father limps and grimly clings to expectations of masculinity, such as pretending to enjoy team sports and smoking cigars, meaning he has become “the loneliest man”. They existed in a world where they lived, but they didn't seem to notice it. ”
These two traumatic stories in modern gay history are told in an emotionless and candid manner, and are invaluable as a perspective only available to those who lived through them. The Stonewall riots were the moment when gay men “began to see themselves as a minority,” and a victory that “allowed them to put their creative energies into something rather than just endure.” There is also. The AIDS crisis is depicted through several thumbnail sketches of brief flirtations, each ending with the five staccato syllables of “He got AIDS and died,” landing with bludgeon-like force. Masu.
As Alan Hollinghurst has said, White is in complete control of his powers, switching between pomposity and seriousness, and a rich tapestry of cultural references (from Jean Genet to Hello Kitty, from Stendhal to Sontag). While carefully developing its unique abilities. “Transforming libido into style'' through metaphor. I mean, he's also a poet. How else to describe a writer who sees in men's eyebrows and closed, unsmiling mouths “the Morse code of male beauty” or, better yet, “the rectangular pitch of a medieval hymn”?
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An impressionistic and relatively short memoir, The Loves of My Life is both a valuable addition to White's extensive bibliography and an effective introduction. The book's opposition to thoughtfulness also includes a subtle call for understanding and compassion, a reminder that what we have gained in terms of LGBTQ rights is fragile, and a reminder to do better, be bolder. It reminds us of the belief that a brighter future is possible. Anyone can make such an optimistic vision sound appealing. Only Edmund White can make it truly enchanting.
