Customer Reviews

My Lives: An Autobiography

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In MY LIVES, Edmund White at 65 has finallly written his autobiography, saying that now is "the right time for casting a backward glance, while one is still fully engaged in one's life." And if we are to believe what the author tells us about himself, engaged he still is. Instead of writing a conventional chronological narrative, Mr. White divides his book into chapters with titles like "My Shrinks," "My Father," My Mother," "My Hustlers," "My Blonds," "My Friends," etc. He avoids saying much about subjects and people he has already covered in his earlier autobioigraphical novels, so he omits much discussion about his HIV status or the work that he has done in the fight against AIDS-- he was one of the founders of the GMHC (Gay Men's Health Crisis), for example, having been at ground zero when the AIDS epidemic hit in the early 80's. I wish he had said more about how living with HIV for over twenty years-- although he remains healthy-- has affected both his world view and his writing.

What Mr. White does is give the reader a lot of information about his parents and people he has known-- a lot of whom he has had sex with-- over the years. (One marvels at his obvious continuing stamina at 65.) He, however, is neither easy on himself nor his parents, letting the reader know that his mother first learned of his father's infidelity when he gave her a sexually transmitted disease. He also relates that his father tried to seduce his daughter when she was 13 or 14 and describes him as "one of the most boring men ever to draw breath." He writes in minute detail of his own sexual adventures, often portraying himself in a less than favorable light. While White writes about his "passivity and self-hatred," he also maintains that he is a really good friend, listing his qualities "necessary in a friend--tenacity, a large capacity for acceptance, curiosity, a genuine pleasure in other people's happiness." He encourages other fledgling writers, something easy to prove outside this memoir since all one has to do is read the many endorsements he freely gives other writers.

If you are looking for a positive role model to assist young gay men to assimilate into the greater heterosexual society, you should look elsewhere. If you are interested, however, in an honest account of one gay man's journey through the last half of the 20th Century, you'll be rewarded for your efforts. For those youngsters who may find fault with Mr. White, just remember that you cannot conceive of what it was like to have been a gay teenager during the repressive Eisenhower 1950's. His remembrance of that era is totally accurate.

No one writing in English today is better at words than Mr. White. His imagery is superb: "He [Charles Silverstein] taught me the subtle ways in which internalized homophobia had left its traces all over me, like a lapdog's muddy footprints on clean sheets." Or White's description of his mother after she and his father were divorced: "It was as if after hobbling around with bound feet she were suddenly unbandaged and told to become a marathon runner." At a Parisian dinner party, he is "the inevitable American oak leaf in his "Gilles'] table when it was fully extended." Finally, Mr. White's description of blonds (p. 294) is beautiful beyond description; it is well worth reading the first 293 pages of this memoir in order to get to that passage.

For over thirty years, Edmund White has written some of the most insightful fiction and non-fiction about American life. He's successfully blended autobiography and the novel to capture the startling ideological and political changes of the country. The scope of his books range from a time when homosexuality was branded a psychological disease to recent strong campaigns to legalize gay marriage. The vivid experiences he's written about are artistically shaped to allow the reader to see things from an entirely new perspective while also finding common emotional ground. This memoir allows us access to White's own true experiences for one of the first times. After re-imagining his life so thoroughly in his popular novels A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room is Empty, The Farewell Symphony and The Married Man, one would assume there would be nothing left to tell. But, in fact, White has led such a rich and varied life that there are numerous important moments and ideas which haven't yet been committed to paper. My Lives allows us intimate access to the real man while still providing thoughtful commentary on affairs beyond his own experience.

Rather than write a straightforward account of his life, White has organized his memoir in sections about particular aspects of his experience such as My Shrinks, My Hustlers, My Friends, etc. At times in this book his pithy summation of a period of American life can be startlingly insightful: "In the 1950s people had been ashamed to admit they were inadequate; in the 1960s they became proud to announce they were victims." In other parts, the intimate details he reveals about his life are so shocking that White humorously guesses at some people's reactions: "'Must we have every detail about these tiresome senile shenanigans?'" However, White's probing exploration of his past has much more value beyond mere gossip. He explores the mechanics and mysteries of desire better than any other writer. The memoir also uses individual experience as an analysis of the larger society by putting historical frameworks around sections of his life.

This book is not the great elder artist, purveyor of gay literature and international lover boasting. Rather, he reveals that he is still a fragile and tender individual who is prone to despair, hopeless infatuation and self-doubt. Bravely and with his usual beautifully crafted prose, the author proves that there is still so much more to tell. This book is a treasure filled with sumptuous and enlightening details and is essential reading for any fan of White's fiction.

At a certain juncture in My Lives, Edmund White jokes that the reader must certainly be saying to himself, "TMI! Too much information!" White is, at that point, talking in extravagant detail about his sex life--but then it's something of a challenge to find a moment in My Lives when he isn't talking about his sex life, or other people's, or describing his partners' physical endowments with the appraising eye of the steer judge at the county fair. When the book is done, the feeling one is left with, above all others, is a kind of disorientation: How is it that a writer with White's career, talent, and success has so little else to talk about? Edmund White is nearly twenty years older than I am, and that may explain a great deal. He was already a mature man when I came out in 1976, had already published two novels (though his real masterpieces, A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, and his book of stories, Skinned Alive were still before him), had already been through his early attempts to cure himself of homosexuality, his first important loves. In the rapid-fire social evolutions and revolutions between White's birth and today, twenty years is a very long time, indeed; so I have no difficulty imagining that questions of sex and desire were defining for White in ways that they were not for me. As I say, that may explain a lot, but I'm not sure it fully explains the obsessive turning over and over of sexual conquests and (especially) sexual failures that characterizes My Lives. In fact, White's revelations seems calculated to produce humiliation (his own: after a certain number of repetitions, his comments about being fat and underendowed solicit disgust rather than sympathy or understanding) and, simultaneously, to force the reader into a nonconsensual S&M relationship. I suppose you've really hit the big time if you can get HarperCollins to help you play dominance and submission, but My Lives is sad when it most wants to be provocative, tawdry when it most wants to elucidate. There's a great deal I'd liked to have learned from Edmund White, but incessant details about phone sex, late-night cruising, failed three-ways, men who didn't love him, men he didn't love, the terrible tragedy of not being young and muscular anymore ... those weren't on my list. In fact, White's sex life is what makes him exactly like everybody else; I bought the book because I was interested in reading about how he was different.

Reading Edmund White, perhaps one of the most heralded gay American writers today, can be a jarring experience. Full of lurid sexual exploits, endless name-dropping of intellectuals with whom he was acquainted, and just for good measure, countless vignettes from the history of French literature, this volume of his autobiography makes for vertiginous reading. In fact, this mixture of a highly personal life with the reflections and insights of an academic make it very much like some of his later fiction (specifically "The Married Man").

But we learn plenty of White's earlier life as well, almost as if White is sitting on the therapist's couch "typing" to a therapeutic word processor. This may not be surprising, since we learn that his mother is a psychologist and his father is a loud, abusive drunk. Throughout the entire arc of his life, he reveals to us a deeply wounded, desperate ego. Many may believe that his celerity to tell us about the personal details of his life is a transparent attempt to offset his fragile personality. It is not an unwarranted conclusion. But by the end of the book, it became clear that he was not trying to account for anything in his past. Rather, after a life full of rejection, one more is but a drop in the ocean. I have seen interviews with him, and his discomfort and unease with his physical appearance are visible in his general mien.

Structurally speaking, this biography is an interesting one. While most are broken down into rough chronological chunks, these chapter divisions are grouped by interests or experiences, from the banal to the more explicit: a few include "My Women," "My Genet," and "My Blondes." In almost all of these, he seems to want to showcase his cynicism and intellectual seclusion. But, needless to say, the innocence which overflowed like milk and honey in "The Beautiful Room Is Empty" runs bone-dry here.

Ultimately, I cannot recommend this, except perhaps for the odd datum about Genet's masochism or Comte de Lautréamont's uncommonly early death. White is at his best in his biographical writing. His book on Genet is a wonderful psychological portrait, and will continue to serve as a sourcebook for both his life and his work. White's autobiographical writing, at least for me, contains a bit too much treacle and self-loathing.

What sets this memoir apart from others I've read is the way White chose to write it. By dividing his book into chapters or sections that explore topics that he felt colored the life he's led, I feel that I know more about him than I ever would have had he chosen to start at his birth writing the events in the order that they happened. In these ten sections, White writes about topics that set the stage for who he became as in "My Shrinks", "My Father", and "My Mother". In other sections he writes about topics that were passions for him at different times in his life as in "My Europe", or "My Genet". In "My Hustlers", and "My Master" he explores his sexual preferences, whereas in "My Blondes" he discusses the type of men with whom he chooses to fall in love. The sections "My Women" and "My Friends" round him out as a person capable of giving and receiving affection and loyalty. All of these topics overlap within sections and the result is a clearer picture of who Edmund White is as an individual and as a writer.

Never in this book does White come across as the elder statesman or older gay male guru who has learned things in his life and now is ready to teach them to us the reader. It is so refreshing to see him as a person who knows that he hasn't rid himself of all his foibles and he comes across as more human because of it. He's never politically correct or ashamed of the things that he's done nor does he apologize for them as he shouldn't. He has always been and still remains a very sexual person in spite of his HIV status. Age (he's in his mid-sixties) hasn't turned him into a eunuch as evidenced by his passion for "T" in the section "My Master".

White's writing is always good, always fresh, and often brilliant. There are excerpts here that are as good or better than the first page of Thomas Wolfe's "Look Homeward Angel", or the excerpt on "Joey" in the beginning of James Baldwin's "Giovanni's Room". I won't tell you which ones they are; I'll let you find them yourself.

This is a book where 2 1/2 stars would be about right. Judging from other reviews, White's fans love this book while others give mixed to negative reviews. At its best, White's prose is frankly beautiful. He is able to capture a scene, a place, or a series of events in way that is completely captivating. Unfortunately, large chunks of the book attempt to deal with motives (his own and those of others) and reflections on his own life or the lives of others. In these places, the effort is self-indulgent and often silly. Despite his own efforts at trying to portray himself as "egalitarian", "enlightened", and beyond his heartland roots, he comes across as the worst sort of provincial: the type who moves to the big city, and travels to interesting places but remains pretty small minded, as if he were becoming a yearning provincial's idea of a cosmopolitan. He clearly has been unable to integrate different parts of his experience, which may explain his failures in psychoanalysis as much as the quack analysts he has employed. He drops the names of concepts from Buddhism in the same way he drops the names of famous acquaintances and it's unclear how these or any other of his intellectual name droppings (like Deweyan pragmatism) have made any impression. In the case of Buddhism, the ideal of transcending ego clearly seems far beyond him. He talks endlessly of poverty throughout his life, yet his mother's alimony and child support was about what a 1950s family usually made, plus she had her own salary. As an adult, he claims to have struggled yet helped support his mother. It just doesn't add up. The chronology falls apart in places and people seem oddly missing from his life including his fellow writers from the collaborative he co-founded, as well as his sister.

White was part of the first cohort of gay writers to achieve some degree of commercial success and mainstream critical recognition. I've read many of their books, but they tend to run together to me--coming of age novels, followed, by AIDS era stories and among the lucky survivors, stories about the trials of middle age. As a group, they tend to be liberal arts grads of "good" colleges from upper middle class families who seem a little oblivious to things like making a living. Had White been born earlier, his gifts would have helped him stay and succeed further in his earlier careers as a Time-Life book writer and university textbook editor. Had he been born later, the glut of coming of age books might have led him to genre fiction, with him self-indulging his way through bad softcore S&M fiction or detective novels. It is perhaps to his detriment that my reading of this book overlapped with reading Ted Kennedy's memoir and a somewhat hero worshiping bio of Pat Tillman. Both of those men did something more than would have been expected of most men and Kennedy was an early advocate of gay rights. By comparison, White's uneven and largely self-indulgent writing here seems trivial, particularly in the context of having been part of a cohort of other, often more talented writers. If you're not a fan already, don't expect too much of this effort.

Edmund White has/is living a rich life. A Life that may or may not be rich in the monetary sense (though this changes throughout his life) but in the sense of being rich with the exalted currency of true friendship. Time and time again in this latest edition of his autobiography (though he may not call his other books "autobiographies," all of his works are drawn from his life as he states herein), "My Lives," White writes about men and women with whom he has remained friends over the course of his entire life: people that are compelled to keep in touch, both Gay and Straight. Some are formers Lovers, Some were objects of White's Lust and sometimes Love. The women, though never lovers, are still his friends because White is the consummate comrade: always available emotionally at least and at best available in the flesh to lend a hand.
"My Lives" is divided into nine sections with names like My Mother, My Shrinks, My Hustlers, Mr. Genet, etc. but naturally all the sections bleed together as White excels in the fine art of straying from the topic. Along the way we get some sterling observations:
"In the 1950's people were ashamed that they were inadequate; in the 1960's they were proud to announce that they were victims...Rilke had said, You must change yourself! But now people said: Everyone else must change."
Though some of what he writes about his Mother, Lila Mae makes me wince, a lot of what White writes about her is very funny: "...Lila Mae's baseless optimism, her coquetry, her insistence that she was an old fashioned gal, 100 % feminine made us (White and his sister Margaret) cackle like gargoyles. Adolescents are wretchedly conventional as they tiptoe nervously into the great crowded ballroom of adulthood."
As he does with all facets of his life, White's examination of his sexual obsessions is exhaustive and brutally honest: "...but all of these encounters with hustlers were as much an expression of fear as of desire, and above all they were animated by curiosity. I was swallowing the sperm of strangers and this feast convinced me that I possessed all of these men. I was like one of those nearly insane saints who must take communion several times a day..."
So real, precisely expressed and profoundly learned...so much there to cause any number of people to bleed out the eyes.
Edmund White is nothing if not blunt, honest: sometimes maybe to a fault but "My Lives," as with much of what White has written, is profoundly observant and beautifully composed. Though White is of course a fine writer particularly when it has to do with his own life, I think that in the long run as an observer of life in all its forms and as a commentator of all he sees, White's greatest contribution both personally and cosmically is his remarkable ability to earn the trust and retain the friendship of those with whom he has remained emotionally tied for many, many years. If a man is judged by how many true friends he has made and kept then White is a truly great human being.

Oy..this book gave me a headache. Too many swirling metaphors, too many clever rambling sentences...when one finally goes screeching to a halt and then putt..putt..putters right into another out of control (to me) stream of consciousness expressed in too many words I had to look up on my desktop dictionary. This guy makes Gore Vidal look like a 5th grade level writer. I've read many authors and can usually absorb what they are trying to say..but alot of this book was like reading a foreign language to me, and I just lost interest, it was too much work. I have no idea if Mr. White is a "nice" man or a pretentious ass, but what I DID come away with from trying to get through this book , other than a headache, was a depressed mood that required 1/2 an "emergency" xanax...It just seemed like a life devoid of any REAL pleasure or meaning, everything seemed totally futile, when it wasn't just blase..(pronounced .."blozzzeyyy"..lol..) And the sex...okay, I get it, there is more to sex than just wham bam..(well..SO I've heard!) but I REALLY can't think of any reason why I would need, nor want.. to hear about someone performing oral sex on someone whilst they are poo-ing. Hey, I'm an averagely attractive ageing guy who, though I appreciate it, .. does not now nor have I ever worshipped at the alter of male beauty. Or, worse yet, made myself feel like a repulsive reject when you can't compete with that (you'd be AMAZED at what a little humor and a homemade streudel can accomplish!...lol.) I had a horrifically abused childhood, and when I was old enough to liberate myself, I did, and other than a few self pitying periods, never looked back. A negative past doesn't HAVE to be who you are, or create a life of self indulgent self flagellation. Oh well, maybe I just missed the point of this book, so let's just go back to my title for this review and leave it at that: I am too dumb to successfully read this book.

If ever an MGM lyric could substitute as a review for an autobiography by Edmund White, That's Entertainment would serve. Reading My Lives by Edmund White induces awe, irritation, skepticism, heavy judgment, shock, frustration and disbelief but never, ever boredom.

For one thing, and above all, his writing is so accessible and chummy it feels like an invitation to judge, agree and participate in his own summaries and evaluations. Ever since Edmund White wrote States of Desire, an evaluation of the courting and sexual habits of men in the U.S. state by state which gay men took seriously and considered a handbook, his writing has been enjoyed for the sexual revelations as well as its brilliance. He relishes this. This is the man who penned the text for The Joy of Gay Sex, and not just for laughs either.

Talk about six degrees of separation, in both My Lives and The Farewell Symphony I have the feeling that I've either known or have heard of half the men whose stories he tells. It helps that I was in and around New York city in the late 70s and early 80s but I can't be alone in this feeling of immediacy. That is one of his greatest charms, he draws you in and makes you feel he's telling you the truth no matter how bad a light it sheds on himself.

For Mr. White, that light can be very harsh. The temptation to judge him severely is overwhelming, especially in his later years when he falls in love with a seemingly booze-sodden sex god. Where is the dignity and wisdom that comes with age and experience, you ask yourself. (Then ask yourself why you need it.) It becomes clear that the greatest achievement of autobiography is how it reflects on the reader who is able to question how deeply and thoroughly he himself has lived. And although he has implied that he has no use for gay marriage, he seems never without someone to drape his arms about for a book cover, an astounding fact in light of the sexual and emotional independence revealed in My Lives. In My Lives he doesn't really define his present relationship, but refers to his current partner as a sidekick in one of his recounted adventures, and it's a partnership which by its absent examination invites fascination given his self-exposure in this book.

What sticks however are not these stories of men and adventures, but the much more intimate accounts about his mother, father and close long-term friendships. These touching and deep examinations are true eye-openers, and make a considerable contrast to the sexual stories which, although entertaining, are not particularly moving. Especially involving is the chapter on several of his friends, how they became friends as young innocents, and how they continue their friendships (or not) as seasoned elders with the dangers of hard-edged adulthood to overcome. The chapter on researching his biography of Jean Genet gave new insights into White's life in France. The difficulties of researching someone whose language is not your own, and interviewing people who do not wished to be interviewed or for whose testimony the cost is considerable, are entertainingly described and elaborated.

At the September 2007 meeting of the NYC LGBT Center Book Discussion group, we discussed "My Lives" by Edmund White. We had a nice group of readers who were split on Mr. White's memoir.

Many thought that Edmund White offers well-turned phrases and interesting ideas, but an equal number thought that he was a little too full of himself. We all thought that some of his chapters, such as "My Father," "My Mother," and "My Genet," were more interesting than the "My Master" and "My Blondes" chapters. Several found the "My Master" chapter disturbingly full of details, with White trying to shock us but failing. While he prides himself on being open, we thought that the complete lack of information about his 12-year (very open) relationship with his current lover was odd.

We also thought that a mention of his long-time friend Susan Sontag, after their falling out, would have been revealing for someone who is trying to reveal himself at last. Some also thought that since some individual chapters were so much better than other chapters, the book seems choppy and showed that some of the chapters had originally been written for publication in magazines and journals.

We continue to respect Mr. White as a serious master who has seen gay liberation through its many modern periods, as he very nicely does in "My Lives," but think that some of his earlier writings are stronger than this.