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My Lives: An Autobiography (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "In the mid-1950s, when I was fourteen or fifteen, I told my mother I was homosexual: that was the word, back then, homosexual, in its..." (more)
Key Phrases: New York, Lila Mae, Jim Ruddy (more...)
3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. White—a prolific essayist, novelist, biographer (of Proust and Genet), travel writer, critic and all-around man of letters—has mined the events and circumstances of his own life frequently and vividly, and has been the subject of two biographies. Wisely, he has not attempted a straightforward autobiography, but instead a collection of essays or meditations, beginning, tellingly, with "My Shrinks," an introduction to his early struggles with homosexuality and later with other problems; the psychoanalytic process led him to "the conviction that everyone is worth years and years of intense scrutiny—not a bad credo for a novelist." Essays on White's divorced parents—his conservative Republican father and hard-working, indulgent mother—are followed by "My Hustlers," which features the kind of candid writing about sex and relationships that has made White a gay icon. His close women friends aren't neglected, nor is the expatriate life he has often described before, including his friendship with French philosopher Michel Foucault. White delivers more on sex than any other subject (which will please many of his fans), but there's plenty more in these gracefully written pieces to engage the intellect, the emotions and even that part of us that responds to name-dropping. For a Princeton professor, White gets around. Photos. (Apr. 1)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From Booklist

Readers will quickly come to realize the reason why this esteemed American writer pluralizes the word life in the title of his memoirs. Now in his midsixties, White (author of a previous memoir, A Boy's Own Story, 1982, and Fanny: A Fiction, 2003, among others) has no interest in a cradle-to-present-day remembrance of his life, no fondness--this time--for any sort of traditional, seamless autobiographical flow. He chooses, instead, to recall significant events, individuals, places, and personal habits in chapter format. So, anecdotes and thoughts about his parents are clustered in chapters called, not surprisingly, "My Mother" and "My Father." Where and with whom he spent much of his adult life is explored in "My Hustlers," "My Europe," and "My Friends." The thread of his early realized homosexuality connects the chapters, and, fortunately, he indicates a middle-age acceptance of inner resources as compensation for the physical bloom having fallen off the rose. Sexually explicit, rich in language, an open and unafraid self-estimation. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 368 pages
  • Publisher: Ecco (April 11, 2006)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0066213975
  • ISBN-13: 978-0066213972
  • Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
  • Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #446,089 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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    #18 in  Books > Literature & Fiction > Authors, A-Z > ( W ) > White, Edmund
    #91 in  Books > Gay & Lesbian > Biographies & Memoirs > Gay

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Edmund White
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In the mid-1950s, when I was fourteen or fifteen, I told my mother I was homosexual: that was the word, back then, homosexual, in its full satanic majesty, cloaked in ether fumes, a combination of evil and sickness. Read the first page
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New York, Lila Mae, Jim Ruddy, Jean Genet, Ann Arbor, Willie Lulu, Boy's Own Story, Fire Island, Albert Dichy, Jacky Maglia, John Purcell, Susan Sontag, Greenwich Village, Hubert Sorin, Prisoner of Love, Rush Street, Time-Life Books, Uncle Jack, University of Michigan, White Industrial, Christian Science, Christopher Street, Cook County Hospital, Edmund Valentine White, Fountain Square
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3.5 out of 5 stars (13 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Edmund White's Own Story, April 29, 2006
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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.
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20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars The Real Thing, April 11, 2006
By Eric Anderson (London, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
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.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars This is a life?, April 10, 2009
This review is from: My Lives: An Autobiography (Hardcover)
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.
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 		 Most Recent Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars Lots of good writing (despite the choppy structure) and some revealing information, but why so quiet on some topics?
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. Read more
Published 1 day ago by HWilliams

2.0 out of 5 stars When he's good, he's very good...
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. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Richard A. Jenkins

3.0 out of 5 stars A Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man
Reading Edmund White, perhaps one of the most heralded gay American writers today, can be a jarring experience. Read more
Published 4 months ago by A Certain Bibliophile

3.0 out of 5 stars But enough about White
Why this book is an autobiography when we've read a lot of it before is beyond me. Must say, the description on how to pick up young men in the greater Cincinnati area was worth... Read more
Published on July 5, 2007 by Midwest opiner

4.0 out of 5 stars White Mischief
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... Read more
Published on December 4, 2006 by MICHAEL ACUNA

5.0 out of 5 stars Edmund White is a Magical Biographer
Edmund White is a magical biographer. And, when it comes to writing his own autobiography, he is beyond compare. White's autobiography is breathtaking from the first paragraph. Read more
Published on November 6, 2006 by R. J. Schmigel

3.0 out of 5 stars Uneven Tales
Like the literary conceit on which the book is based, My Lives is all over the place both in the quality of its writing and in the quality of its insights. Read more
Published on July 2, 2006 by M. W. Senger

5.0 out of 5 stars A Brilliant Memoir

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... Read more
Published on June 23, 2006 by Elton T. Elliott

4.0 out of 5 stars Disarming frankness of a gay life spanning Stonewall
How many well-known gay people are there who are "out" and whose adult lives span Stonewall -- a Democratic Party politician? an English singer? Read more
Published on June 22, 2006 by A reader from Boston, MA

2.0 out of 5 stars Still Self-hating After All This Years
The chapters of Edmund White's My Lives may be named My Mother, My Hustlers, My Master, but he jumps from subject to subject with no transitions. Read more
Published on April 18, 2006 by Charles L. Ross

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