The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir by Edmund White review – a glorious celebration of queer love
In this, Edmund White’s sixth memoir, the American novelist and critic observes that a universal prudishness about sex sits alongside the fact that it is constantly on our minds. Sex, White writes, with the nonchalant wisdom that runs throughout this book, is “a language one speaks” that is both “communal and isolating”. Transcribing the vocabulary of sex – especially sex between men – has been White’s lifelong literary project, most famously in the semi-autobiographical 1982 novel A Boy’s Own Story. Loves of My Life approaches the task with refreshing candour. The result is something like an erotic almanac, charting the shifting sexual mores and conventions of gay life through seven decades, from the “oppression of the 1950s” to the “brewing storm in the 2020s against everything labelled ‘woke’”.
White begins the memoir by confessing that, despite having “a small penis”, he has been “stung” by sexual desire since the age of 10. This early moment of authorial undress is a typical piece of self-satire, part of his puckish compulsion to make himself the butt of the joke. It is, he admits in one of many sharp asides about the mechanics of life writing, an auto-fictive sleight-of-hand, an act of “literary daredevilry” which here makes him a consistently endearing, amiable narrator. The book’s funniest moments arise in dialogue that White has himself speak as a delightfully dry and “curiously wise” adolescent. In one scene, he gauges the receptiveness of an apparently straight potential lover by inventing a tall tale about a promiscuous queer schoolmate. Noticing that his audience has become aroused, he announces: “Well it’s me. I’m the cocksucker.”
White tunes in and out of different years as though dreamily fiddling with a radio dial
The memoir’s unashamed opening sets the tone, and serves as an inoculation of sorts, preparing any potentially scandalised reader for what’s to come. Soon after, we encounter a list of the pros and cons of hiring men for sex; a pair of erotically charged, urine-stained denim jeans; and “hillbilly hustlers” with convoluted sexual codes (receiving oral sex from other men didn’t make them “homos”, they felt, because “only queers and girls suck men’s cocks”). Such details accumulate across 200 or so pages, and combine to create a pointillistic canvas of gay desire and male sexuality in its many paradoxes and contradictions.
But The Loves of My Life is far more textured and variegated than its enticing subtitle (“A Sex Memoir”) has us believe. It is also a writer’s memoir and a rumination on craft – something that complements rather than contradicts the amatory theme. For White, the act of writing is both an expression of desire (“sex is better on the page”), and the means through which we can better understand our private sexual natures. White first wrote fiction about gay sex, he tells us, as a teenager, while he was still closeted. It was as though he first needed to “imagine being gay before doing anything about it” – a wonderful notion, that the formation of self-identity is a kind of artistic act.
Whistle-stop reflections on White’s own novels – his journey from “experimental books” to “transparently realistic” autobiographical fiction – are attached to deeper questions around novelists’ enduring obsession with writing about love. In one of the memoir’s most exquisitely executed metaphors, White asks if passionate love is “like paranoia, a way of tying all the disparate events together”. He often frames his insights like this, as guesswork, or in the form of questions. This speculative approach doesn’t read like hedging or prevarication. On the contrary, it feels instructive: love might be inscrutable, but if we approach it with curiosity, we will occasionally catch a glimpse of its true meaning.
The Loves of My Life is not arranged chronologically. White tunes in and out of different years as though dreamily fiddling with a radio dial – a decision made because “desire does not obey any timetable”. If that justification feels thin, it’s strengthened by the observation that, when we masturbate, “we flash from one memory to another, skipping decades”, chasing desire wherever it goes, unconcerned with narrative sequence. Instead, the book is organised into loosely themed chapters (“Sex with Straight Men”, “Sadomasochism”), which he braids with paraphrased bits of theory. Sadomasochism, for instance, is something we first adopt as babies “because we need to eroticise the helplessness we’re feeling in order to deal with it” – according to the queer academic Leo Bersani, anyway.
Other chapters are named after former lovers, all men except for one. In “Becky”, White sensitively recounts his ill-fated pursuit of heterosexual romance at the age of 25, when he was “in therapy to go straight”. These character portraits are lent depth thanks to his knack for capturing the essence of past partners’ various plights (which, despite his observation that writing should be done with a “scalpel not a brush”, is surely an act of empathy). Stan – White’s first “husband”, who was roped into a drug-addled clique before finding AA – is a man so confused by anxiety and “so absorbed by his insecurities that he couldn’t really follow a conversation”. It’s an efficient and affecting description of depression, matched, later on, by White’s portrait of his own father, whose dreary, foot-dragging adherence to expectations of masculinity – pretending to enjoy team sports, smoking cigars – meant he became “the loneliest man in the world and didn’t seem to notice it”.
Passages on two seismic events in modern gay history are invaluable, here, for their unsentimental frankness, a perspective only afforded to someone who actually lived through them. The Stonewall uprising is both the moment that gay men began “thinking we were a minority” and the victory that “permitted us to put our creative energies into something other than simply enduring”. The Aids crisis is portrayed through several thumbnail sketches of brief flings, each closing with five staccato syllables – “he got Aids and died” – that land with the force of a bludgeon.
White is so clearly in complete control of his powers, switching between coquetry and high seriousness, weaving a rich tapestry of cultural references (Jean Genet to Hello Kitty, Stendhal to Sontag) while carefully deploying his unique ability, as Alan Hollinghurst put it, to “translate libido into style” through metaphor. Which is to say, he is also a poet. How else to describe a writer who sees, in the eyebrows and unsmiling, closed mouth of a man, a “Morse code of male beauty”, or even better, “the oblong pitches in a medieval hymnal”?
An impressionistic and relatively short memoir, The Loves of My Life is both a worthy addition and effective introduction to White’s wider bibliography. The book’s push against prudishness also contains a subtle call for understanding and compassion – reminders that what has been gained in terms of LGBTQ rights is fragile, and a conviction that a better, bolder future is possible. Anyone can make such an optimistic vision sound appealing; only Edmund White could make it truly seductive.
• The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir by Edmund White is published by Bloomsbury (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
