The Loves of My Life
By Edmund White
Bloomsbury U.S., January 28, 2025
From the legendary author Edmund White, a stunning, revelatory memoir of a lifetime of gay love and sex.
In this peerless memoir, the 85-year-old “paterfamilias of queer literature” (The New York Times) recounts the sixty-plus years of sexual escapades that have inspired his many masterpieces. He explores the sex he had with other closeted boys in the 50s Midwest, with women as a young man trying to be straight, the sex he’s paid for and been paid for, sex during the Stonewall and HIV eras, and in the age of the apps. Through stories of transactional sex, mutual admiration, open relationships, domination, submission, love, and loss, he paints an indelible portrait of queer history in America and abroad in a way only someone who has lived through it can.
Written with White’s signature honesty, irreverence, and wit, The Loves of My Life is the culmination of this legend’s life and work, a delightful and moving tour of over seventy years of being unabashedly gay and in love with love in all its forms.
Selected Praise for Edmund White
“Studded with endless witticisms and brilliant social comedy, this book is likely the most clever and creative pornographic novel ever written by an octogenarian… Everything you love about White, explicit sex, French champagne, and insouciant murder included.” –Kirkus
“As ever, White is a master of social comedy and wry observations… Readers will delight in this immersion into a lurid world of passion.” –Publishers Weekly, starred review
“White’s literary soap opera is engaging and compulsively readable, and in typical White fashion,
there is more than a soupçon of sex.” –Booklist
“White continues his legacy as a pioneer of queer literature with this mesmerizingly erotic
tragicomedy.” –Buzzfeed
“The work of Edmund White stands as an unignorable achievement in the past half-century of
American literature. It is astonishing to see him, in his ninth decade, after more than a dozen novels, writing with such daring and abandon, with the true artist’s bracing, vivifying disregard for the stifling canons of good taste. He is one of our living treasures, an inspiration and a wonder.” –Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness
“[Edmund White] is the paterfamilias of queer literature.” –The New York Times
“[Edmund White is] one of the three or four most virtuosic living writers of sentences in the English language.” –Dave Eggers, author of The Every
“Edmund White has crossed J. D. Salinger with Oscar Wilde to create an extraordinary novel.”
–The New York Times Book Review, on A Boy’s Own Story
About the Author
Edmund White is the author of many novels, including A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, The Farewell Symphony, and Our Young Man. His nonfiction includes City Boy, Inside a Pearl, The Unpunished Vice, and other memoirs; The Flâneur, about Paris; and literary biographies and essays. He was named the 2018 winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction and received the 2019 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation. Edmund White is the author of many novels, including A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, The Farewell Symphony, and A Previous Life. His nonfiction includes City Boy, Inside a Pearl, The Unpunished Vice, and other memoirs; The Flâneur, about Paris; and literary biographies and essays. He has received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction and the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation. He lives in New York.
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