He is careful not to romanticise the gradual closing of this gap between how he lived
He is careful not to romanticise the gradual closing of this gap between how he lived and what he could write. A lot of self-hatred and self-doubt had to be cleared, and these elements of his persona are evident in My Lives. One reason for the success of these books is White’s ability to isolate memory from history. He made this series an autobiographical quartet in 2000 with a plangent novel about his lover Hubert Sorin’s death from Aids: The Married Man.It says something about the power of the first person that, even though White has published two collections of essays, an award-winning biography of Genet, a short life of Proust, two memoirs of life in Paris, two collections of short stories, a book of travel and a historical novel, he remains known for his autobiographical quartet. After two formative decades in New York, he moved to Paris and his novels followed him.
A Boy’s Own Story led to The Beautiful Room is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony in 1997, which White thought would be his last novel. I had tried to normalise him a little bit”.Over time, White’s fiction caught up with the ecstatic (and frantic) way that he was living his life. This endless wailing about your childhood.”White would have had plenty of reasons to gripe. As My Lives reveals, he grew up in the heartland of America long before casual bigotry against homosexuals became the White House’s re-election tool. White has more claims to being Texan than the current President.
Both sides of his family hail from the Lone Star state, where one grandfather was a member of Ku-Klux-Klan, and the other a grope-prone, one-legged misfit.Some of the details found their way into A Boy’s Own Story, which has become the Ur-text for the coming-out story But not all My Lives makes apparent how much he toned things down. In A Boy’s Own Story, “I tried to make the boy more normal than I was – in real life I was precocious both intellectually and sexually… “I felt if I went chronologically, I’d get bogged down in childhood and that’s part of our culture of complaint in America. The result is an even more personal, lyrical glimpse of his life and times. If his autobiographical novels were a blueprint of his memory, this book is its to-scale model. “I could have written a whole other book like this about entirely different subjects,” says White, dressed in khakis and a short-sleeve check shirt But he did not want to fall prey to the confessional. This is White’s best book, the one which channels his finest writing yet manages to close down the flesh buffet before it goes to stink Part of the success comes from the structure.
My Lives proceeds in long, set-piece chapters with titles like “My Mother”, “My Europe” and “My Genet”. “But I’m actually quite shy about my life in person.”This is actually true. White is somewhat bashful and, surrounded by the pungent fug of a soft-cheese dip, the author of A Boy’s Own Story and other novels proves an excellent source of gossip, literary conversation, and good humour. He talks quickly and fluently in a high fluty tone, and will follow a debate down any rabbit hole. He is not, however, such a terrific expert on being Edmund White.That knowledge has been funnelled into his books, and My Lives appears to be the one he has built toward for the past 30 years. “Alan Hollinghurst said he thinks it is my best yet,” White blurts out at one point The puppyish glee makes the boast forgivable.
