The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir

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＂ (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 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.

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.