Book description
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 theirā¦
Why read it?
1 author picked My Lives as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
Sexual desire, acted on or repressed, is either the text or subtext of every gay man's life.
Edmund White treats sex explicitly and with bracing honesty. His franknessāfor example, in describing his fumbling, agonized, danger-courting attempts as a kid to find loveārecalled my own youthful risks and failures, but freed those memories of shame.
I've read few of White's many books. (Guess I was jealous of his output and acclaim; better I should have emulated his driving curiosity and intelligence.) His recent death, at 85, prompted me to read this narrative of his long, unruly, ceaselessly questing life.
A sharpā¦
From Jonathan's list on fearless memoirs about growing up gay.
If you love My Lives...
Night Terminus
Beginning with a chance encounter in 1985, an unnamed narrator embarks on a physical and spiritual sojourn over four decades.
From a one-night stand in Paris with the troubled and enigmatic Louis, to Montreal, through a divided Europe, and into the Iranian desert with the sick yet determined Yuri, andā¦
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