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.”
