These days, you’re awfully distracted. You can’t think right, can’t stay focused, you daydream and fantasize and imagine. You’re completely twitterpated and feeling the best kind of despair and happiness together. Face it: You’re hopelessly in love – again – and as in the new memoir, “The Loves of My Life” by Edmund White, it’s glorious.
When an accomplished novelist reaches the middle of his eighth decade, he should state what’s been most important in his life. For Edmund White, it’s the “thousands of sex partners” he’s had since he was a mere child.
He was 10 years old or thereabouts when he fell in love with a boy he alternately calls Nick and Cam. They spent a lot of after-school time together, wrestling and roughhousing, as boys do, and it eventually became sexual.
Six years later, White was working for his father and making enough money to hire men for sex, mostly straight men who hailed from Kentucky, just across the border from White’s Ohio home. Sometimes, doing so put him in danger because being gay then was something shameful and undiscussed.
At around this time, he met an older, “camp” man who taught him the slang of gay life.
He met some of his lovers on Craigslist and some while traveling with a man he calls his “first husband.” He sought therapy, hoping to be “cured” of homosexuality, and he briefly fell in love with a woman, thinking he’d get married and raise a family. He loved younger men and older men, from Madrid, Boston, Scotland, at bathhouses, at parties, and he’s had several loveof- his-life romances. Sex, says White, was always linked with love.
He’s watched too many men die of AIDS. He had “AYOR” sex (“at your own risk”). He’s slept with men around the world and once, he got poison ivy for it.
All this was fun then, he says, but “Now in the cold polar heart of old age,” he looks back at it all “as comical and pointless, repetitious and dishonorable.”
Considering that “The Loves of My Life” is subtitled as it is, it’s not as explicit as you might think it would be. Yes, this memoir will steam up a window right quick, but the heat is tempered by author Edmund White’s sense of humor and wry outlook.
Those two aspects tend to give a reader a break in what would otherwise be a long string of fast-and-furious romps and a litany of randiness. Break intact, stories connect but you can enjoy each for its own merits of exploration and joie de vivre, accompanied by straightforwardness and what feels like honest soul-searching without much gratuitousness. White also freely admits to a few mistakes in his lifetime, further endearing himself to readers.
It shouldn’t need to be said that there’s profanity inside this book – you should expect it from its subtitle – but beware, if you’re looking for pearls to clutch. For readers who don’t care about that and want a decent memoir, “The Loves of My Life” is a very pleasant distraction.
— The Bookworm Sez
