Book Review: ‘The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir,’ by Edmund White

THE LOVES OF MY LIFE: A Sex Memoir, by Edmund White

Some people celebrate turning 85 with grandchildren, gardening or a nice cake. Edmund White has published a sex memoir.

“The Loves of My Life,” which follows “My Lives,” (2006) City Boy” (2009) and recollections of Paris and reading, is gaspingly graphic, jaunty and tender: a guided tour of a foreign land — foreign to this female hetero at least — where libido is the wellspring of just about everything. It’s far from a solemn capstone to White’s long and distinguished career. More like a mischievous rock-skipping in the moonshadow.

“We’d dance in the nude in the dark,” he rhapsodizes of an entanglement with a ballerino, “or rather he’d dance and I would stumble about, like Bottom pursuing Titania, breathily caressing him across those bare boards in front of those walls of mirrors illuminated just by the distant, feeble streetlights.”

This is a PG-rated passage from a book for which we should claw back the now-cursed letter X — as in explicit, yes, but also excavatory and excellent. White’s escapades include streams of urine (“We both competed for it like seals begging for fish. I make it sound comical but it was as serious as a christening”), flexing bowels, pubic lice, an incalculable amount of semen. The revolution will not be sanitized.

Devoted fans might find some of the material familiar. White recaps his body count (some 3,000 men: “One of my contemporaries asked pityingly, ‘Why so few?’”) and revisits that William Blake line about sooner strangling an infant in its crib than nursing unacted desires. Readers who have encountered White before will not be surprised either to find mentions of kilts, and Proust. But though I’m not a White completist — by his count he’s written 32 books, including novels and biographies, and there’s also the occasional play — I’m not sure he’s ever delivered it in such concentrated, gleeful hits. Prose poppers, with a few poems as well.

White is not just a Bottom but, as he’ll tell you 90 percent of men in New York City are, a “bottom,” preferring to be penetrated. On Page 1 he mentions his small penis — later modified to “tiny.” He has long worried about his weight, and struggled with self-acceptance even as he wrote the classic manual “The Joy of Gay Sex” with one of his therapists. In one instance he imagines himself Mr. Snuffleupagus from “Sesame Street”; in another he rues his “feeble filiform arms, these useless pale appendages.”

Yet who better than a beast to assess and appreciate a beauty? “His complexion was faultless and glowing, as if a light were shining through the best Belgian linen,” White writes of Stan, a depressive aspiring actor with whom he cohabited long ago in New York (touchingly, they’re still in touch). Of a Spanish Ecuadorean man he met more recently on a website called SilverDaddies: “Pedro had a delicate, shame-faced manner, as if he’d just broken an expensive goblet and was tiptoeing away from the shards.” A blond Floridian body builder’s impressive member, when tumescent, is compared to “the Christ Child in its hay crèche.”

White has told the story of his Midwestern Gothic family before, but there are more peeks here. His grandfather was a Klansman and the racist senator Strom Thurmond was a distant cousin, the memory of which quickly chills White’s adventures with a sexual “slave.” In shocking passing he mentions that his sister was impregnated at 13 by their horrible father, and survived to become happy and productive and at work on her own memoir.

Their mother, a psychologist from Texas and an alcoholic, “colonized every corner of my mind she could understand and made me pick her blackheads and put her into her Merry Widow foundation garment.”

Despite these glimpses, though, the narrative roves and alights rather than burrowing. White’s husband, Michael Carroll — they’ve been together since 1995 — appears only in the acknowledgments and a fleeting anecdote about a pickup on an airplane. “I’ve always thought that writing about someone is the kiss-off,” White writes. While seeming to hold back nothing, he clings to what is most essential.

Danger colors the entire book, first that of being discovered, shunned, blackmailed, robbed, arrested and jailed; then of AIDS; White, who found out he was H.I.V. positive in 1985, outlived many lovers and friends. “We should also recognize we’re still being pushed off cliffs in Yemen — and from the top fronds of Florida palms, for all I know,” he writes. He has witnessed and endured so very much: the upholstered repression of the 1950s, the way the orgiastic 1970s reassessed the ’60s as a time of “misguided rhetoric, bad haircuts, and fake velvet and near-fur,” the fearful ’80s and the dashed promise of the internet.

In the current political climate, twisting back toward repression, “The Loves of My Life,” slim as it is, lands louder and prouder than it otherwise might have.

THE LOVES OF MY LIFE: A Sex Memoir | By Edmund White | Bloomsbury | 224 pp. | $27.99