Of all writers, Edmund White should know that for many authors it is hard to escape their destiny. Some gay writers feel that there is more to write about than being gay, but unfortunately, for many such writers writing about various themes while deliberately excluding the gay theme, results in literary works which are not successful, because either their readers intuitively feel that the author's true heart is not in it, or simply because their readership expects them to write a different kind of book. Edmund White's novel Caracole is perhaps one of the best examples of that.

Most novels of Edmund White are explicitly, openly and proudly gay, making him a beacon in the gay liberation movement. White has written many novels with gay themes, of which a number are autobiographical. As a critic, he has reviewed many gay-themed books, reviews collected and published as The Burning Library: Writings on Art, Politics and Sexuality 1969-1993 and written a biography of Jean Genet.

Born in 1940, White spent much of his younger years discovering his sexuality in repressive circumstances, before the gay liberation took off in the 1970s.

My lives. An autobiography is a big book in which White tries to bring the various strands of his life together, covering his entire life time from his earliest youth till the present, i.e. the first decade of the 21st century. While the autobiography is arranged in thematic chapters, a chronological order is still largely discernible. Within the framework of the thematic chapters, White creates some chapters which are very explicitly gay, while other chapters apparently omit references to the gay life style. As a result, some chapters are downright boring, and it is also obvious that the chosen framework is strained at times, showing the author had difficulty coming up with enough chapter headings to fit the categories. Thus, the reader has to work his way through chapters with extraordinary headings, viz. "My shrinks", "My father", "My mother", "My hustlers", "My women", "My Europe", "My master", "My blonds", "My Genet", and "My friends". At an average length of 30 pages for each chapter, the reader is asked to patiently spend one third of reading the book about the author's parents and other women in his life (about 100 pages out of 355 pages).

Fiction is different from autobiography, and in My lives. An autobiography Edmund White has chosen to be very honest. This honesty comes with a degree of explicitness in his descriptions that is perhaps interesting to a gay readership, but would be a bit over the top for other readers. (One could surmise that neither the author nor the publisher have any other readership in mind.) Gradually it becomes clear that in his personal life Edmund White has rather kinky tastes.

The thematic structure of the book may be novel, it also has marked disadvantages. In this form, the book focuses on a very limited number of topics, while undoubtedly large parts of the life, including travels, work, and the wider circle of social events is lost. Some of this comes is captured in the chapters "My Europe" and "My friends", but particularly in that last chapter the focus is so much on the friends that it becomes more like names-dropping than a description of friendship and the influence of the friends on the personal growth of the author.

While it could be argued that anyone's life is to some extant interesting, Edmund White at first glance might be a bit more interesting than average, given the time he grew up and his involvement and work as an author in the gay scene. However, this interest is rather localized to the gay scene. Although White's life is interesting, he is not a great man, whereas Jean Genet, for instance was.

In My lives. An autobiography White seems to make a quite wrong estimate about his own significance. Particularly, the thematic structure of the book puts too much emphasis on less interesting topics, while more interesting parts of the life are not developed properly in context. It is obvious that the AIDS epidemic is downplayed: it is there, but none of the impact it must have had is described in any detail, except in relation to White's friend Michel Foucault. White's ex-lovers are really not all that interesting, especially not if they are grouped in one chapter ("My blonds") and the focus is more on them than on the author. Likewise, it seems authorial whim to dedicate a whole chapter ("My master") to a very recent fling of the author. This chapter also typifies White's inability to see things in the right perspective in My lives. An autobiography. Why spend 10% of the book on a short and failed gay relationship of the 60 year-old author with a young man only referred to as "T" or his master in a kinky S&M relationship. The author is smugly aware of that as he writes:

"I can imagine some of my friends reading this and muttering 'T M I - Too Much Information,' or 'Are we to be spared nothing? Must we have every detail about these tiresome senile shenanigans?' (p. 228). ( )

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. ( )

Having glanced at this book before buying it, I was expecting that the discussion of White's sex life to be its most entertaining feature; but I was surprised that I found the frankness of that somewhat embarrassing. Had I been one of the partners he names, I would have felt it to be an invasion of my privacy.
On the other hand, the account of how he managed to write Genet's life was far more fascinating and enlightening than I had expected.
The whole is skillfully composed and well written, as is to be expected from White. ( )

A wonderful read from a fine writer. If you want an inside look at the gay life you can find it here. ( )