The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir

by Edmund White

Overview

From the legendary author Edmund White, a stunning, revelatory memoir of a lifetime of gay love and sex.

"The story of [Edmund White's] 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.

In this peerless memoir, 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 in 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 stories 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 this 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781639733729
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	01/28/2025
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	713,404
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.25(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Edmund White is the author of many novels, including A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, The Farewell Symphony, and A Previous Life. His nonfiction includes City Boy, Inside a Pearl, The Unpunished Vice, and other memoirs; The Flâneur, about Paris; and literary biographies and essays. He has received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction and the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation. He lives in New York.

Editorial Reviews

I don't know anyone, except Edmund White, who's had 'thousands of sex partners.' I definitely don't know anyone who writes so ebulliently about former lovers. In his panoply of sexual encounters, Edmund White's love of sex makes us proud to human. And the story of his sex life reads like a beautifully crafted, very moving (and very funny!) novel.” —John Irving

“Nearly 50 years after the great Edmund White co-authored The Joy of Gay Sex, we get even more joy, more candor, and more of White's peerless literary style in a witty and highly personal memoir devoted to a lifelong love of sex, and of sex and love. Fabulous-and inspiring!” —Bill Hayes, author of IINSOMNIAC CITY: NEW YORK, OLIVER, AND ME

“Edmund White's The Loves of My Life is a raw, frightening, funny, and beautiful testimony, brimming with transgressive wisdom. White asks all the right questions, forcing me to expand much of what I imagined about desire and longing. There's so much of the under-examined (sex) life laid bare here-enough to make grown folks blush. But it was the skilled explorations of the twin demons of hatred and self-hatred that broke me down and broke me open. The Loves of My Life is an invaluable historical understanding of how gay men navigate perpetually hostile terrain and sometimes manage to avoid its death traps.” —Robert Jones, Jr., New York Times bestselling author of THE PROPHETS, a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction

“Balletic in its horniness.” —Jami Attenberg, author of THE MIDDLESTEINS

“Exhaustively wonderful. An unflinching, romantic, and generous climax by a bright star in our literary constellation. The gayest book ever written.” —Henry Hoke, author of OPEN THROAT

“The books by 80-year-old American novelist, memoirist and essayist Edmund White-honest, fierce and joyful explorations of love, sex and family-have been breaking boundaries and engaging readers for nearly 50 years.” —AARP

“[Edmund White is] one of the three or four most virtuosic living writers of sentences in the English language.” —Dave Eggers, author of THE EVERY

From the Publisher