The sexual escapades of Edmund White sound like an improbably sordid Carry On film

Edmund White grew up in a world where sex, and gay sex in particular, was an unspoken reality. In 1950s Cincinnati, ‘no one “came out” except drag queens and the campy peroxided waiter at the diner’, he writes in the first chapter of The Loves of My Life. That blanket of near-silence doesn’t seem to have inhibited him much. He was sexually precocious from the age of 12, as his autobiographical novel A Boy’s Own Story (1982) first suggested. But it may account for the determined frankness with which he has treated sex in both his fiction and memoirs. For an author who came of age in pre-liberation America, erotic candour has always been a political act, at least in part – never merely profligate.

Most popular

Sam Olsen

Why Trump doesn’t see Putin as a real threat

Freddy Gray

The cruellest thing about Trump vs Zelensky? Trump’s right

Gavin Mortimer

Christoph Heusgen is just another arrogant boomer

Even so, there is a gleeful lack of restraint to the real-life stories that make up this joyously meandering account of the love affairs, hook-ups and clinches of White’s long life. ‘I’ve hired men for sex all my life,’ begins a chapter titled ‘Hustlers’, in which the 85-year-old traces the dynamics and lurid details of numerous such encounters. They range from the dumb priapism of the ‘hillbillies’ he picked up as a middle-class teenager to the appetites of jobbing ‘masseurs’ in the internet era. ‘In the early 1980s I would hire countless men in a Cretan village,’ he recalls. ‘It was paradise. Everyone was available for a price, even the mayor.’

Each chapter has the air of an intimate monologue – ruminative, gossipy and intermittently comedic, however melancholy or abject the revelations. That sense of an unanswered soliloquy perhaps says something about White’s mode of loving: ‘For me, love was always passionate and one-sided, aspirational and impossible, never domestic and mutual.’