...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.
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.
...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.
I don’t know that I’ve ever read a book about sex that’s quite so self-effacing ... The reader of The Loves of My Life might feel that White should cut himself a little slack. He lived through momentous times, times of bounty and times of want, of triumph and tragedy in gay America, and this is a fascinating document of the era and its people at their most passionate and intimate. I daresay I’ve never read a memoir that’s more intimate. If the personal is political, this memoir is so political you might worry about catching crabs from it ... White writes beautifully about desire at its most fevered and abject ... This mix of the eye-poppingly explicit and the gently lyrical is a hallmark of White’s sex writing. He asks why sex so rarely has a place in serious literature, and The Loves of My Life makes a case for all that an explicit sex scene can accomplish ... might not reorient anyone’s orrery, but I dare anyone not to be somewhat turned on by its mix of the earthy and the cosmic, the steamy and the comic.
This NSFW addition to a well-sexed body of work does exactly what it says on the tin. ... The sound of a bedpost banging against a wall can be monotonous, and numerous incidents recounted here were previously described...Those earlier memoirs are an invaluable record of an extraordinary life, but certainly benefit from being about more than sex (even if there’s still lashings of it to go around) ... feels instead like a scrappily spliced greatest hits ... For those reading White for the first time it might not matter. At his best he remains a superior anatomist of erotic obsession and there are many beautifully written passages here, no pun intended.
Near the end, White complains that octogenarian impotence has left him unable even to masturbate. Never mind: the climax for him comes in the writing, which in The Loves of My Life is as juicy, ebullient and ecstatic as in his best novels. In person, he may be undesirable, as he says in a grimace at his sagging body, unworthy of being loved by anyone except his readers, whom he will never meet – but that, for White, is the only form of reciprocation that matters.
In prose that is unrivalled, stacked with a vocabulary that is to be envied, he takes on subjects and stories that might, in some areas of the literary and cultural world, still be considered Verboten; even a chapter intellectualizing BDSM gets down to the nitty-gritty of what makes lovers of pain (giving and receiving) tick. A kind of glee infuses this book. It’s as if White is getting a kick out of remembering and sharing his lifetime of sexcapades. Prudes are sure to pass out. Although among White’s legion of admirers, can there be even a single prude? ... Mr. White is simply being beautifully, unapologetically human in this book. And that, and he, are a delight. Revealing the intimacies of one’s sex life, so unabashedly, so joyously opens one up to vulnerability, in much the same way a customer eases himself down into a barber’s chair for a razor shave. One is left totally exposed. Each chapter here also presents the reader with sharp, psychological analyses of character, examining the motives behind why gay men pursue who and what they love. This book is also great fun; I finished it in two sittings, something I never do.
a brilliant, envelope-pushing memoir that explores how we have sex and why. The answer? It’s fun and feels good! ... To any White superfan (which this reviewer is), The Loves of My Life is a must-read. To those not inducted, this rousing memoir still provides intriguing, fresh ideas about how we connect. Ultimately, pleasure reigns supreme.
In crisply written episodes laced with a wry sense of humor about his own shortcomings and social foibles, White remains a talented, carnally flagrant raconteur whose memoir thumps with the palpably racing heartbeat of life, sex, love, and unbridled desire. An irreverent and unapologetically provocative scrapbook of an aging author’s sex life.
