The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir
...his prose here, as ever, is so redoubtably stylish that I almost wish he’d enshrined every last tryst in print. What he has gotten down are the wisdom, fun, churlishness, humor, vanity, despair, agony, elevation, debasement, discovery, and delight, along with the bad breath, the body odor, the crabs, and the English Leather liberally applied. Above all, the beauty ... Clearly this is not a book for prudes. An anecdote about 'an entire football' (American or Euro, I cannot say) used at 'a fisting colony in Normandy' had me clutching my pearls. On the whole, though, White respects carnality too much to profane it. He can describe an episode of defecation in a two-car garage as if it were the plainest, tenderest thing, a chaste kiss ... I’ve seen sex written about with passion and dispassion, but seldom in the same book, and never in the same sentence. Maybe everyone in their eighties should write candidly, fearlessly ... But really what I want is for White to have access to everyone’s memories, their spank banks, with full creative license ... Line for line, I can’t recall the last time I enjoyed reading anything so much.
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The kink comes off kindly. Imagine a droll grandfather-type, afghan blanket across his lap, embarrassing his children ... All of these vignettes move along like a sushi train, melodic enough but with no particular narrative structure. Sometimes White rambles, or wobbles off into poetry. Characters from previous books reappear, looking much as they did the first time around. Nonetheless, he remains an astonishingly elegant stylist, with a genius for similes. His witty details are always buffed to high polish. It’s a briny pleasure to read about outré sex in sentences as baroque as peonies, as smooth as eggnog. Gossamer prose and ramrod honesty are White’s dual credos, and each is made peculiar and fresh by the presence of the other ... This self-deprecation oils the gears of White’s wit, but it also works as an invitation, gathering beneath its ribs everyone who feels inadequate to some concocted mirage of what sex should be. Look how pathetic I am, and yet how horny! I’ll take my pleasure, and you should too.
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...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 ... But The Loves of My Life is far more textured and variegated than its enticing subtitle ('A Sex Memoir') has us believe. It is also a writer’s memoir and a rumination on craft – something that complements rather than contradicts the amatory theme ... An impressionistic and relatively short memoir, The Loves of My Life is both a worthy addition and effective introduction to White’s wider bibliography. The book’s push against prudishness also contains a subtle call for understanding and compassion – reminders that what has been gained in terms of LGBTQ rights is fragile, and a conviction that a better, bolder future is possible. Anyone can make such an optimistic vision sound appealing; only Edmund White could make it truly seductive.
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