My Lives

No one has ever been more frank, lucid, rueful and entertaining about growing up gay in Middle America than Edmund White. Best known for his autobiographical novels, White takes the fiction out of his story and delivers the facts in all their shocking and absorbing verity. From an adolescence in the 1950s, an era that tried to 'cure' homosexuality, he emerged into a 1960s society which re-designated his orientation as 'acceptable (nearly)'. He describes a life touched by psychotherapy in every decade, starting with his flamboyant therapist mother who demanded that he be her own personal test case. In "My Lives", White also shares his enthusiasm for England, his passion for Paris, and introduces us to his friends and lovers, past and present. His striking and eloquent opinions on art and life make this a spectacular read, by turns moving and hilarious, outrageous and enlightening.

ISBN 0747579644   DEWEY edition DC22 ISBN13 9780747579649 (What's this?)   Pages 368 Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing PLC   Published in London Imprint Bloomsbury Publishing PLC   Previous ISBN 9780747575221 Format Paperback   Height (mm) 198 Publication date 03 Jul 2006   Width (mm) 129 DEWEY 813.54   Academic level General

'Remarkable ... among the most heartbreaking accounts of family life I have ever read ... This is an astonishing and wonderfully well-written biography' Justin Cartwright, Independent on Sunday 'This is White's best book ... If his autobiographical novels were a blueprint of his memory, this book is its to-scale model' Independent 'A vital and engrossing book ... His account of himself is clear, humorous, never coy. He knows that his "painful honesty" is the source of his humour. And we feel strongly, at the end of this remarkable book, that it is more than that: it is the source of everything, however artful and luscious, that he has ever written' Alan Hollinghurst, Guardian 'He is such a good writer he deserves to be read by everyone' Sunday Telegraph

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