The Loves of My Life - Edmund White

256 pages · Hardcover · Bloomsbury Publishing, January 2025

Gossip Without Heat

Edmund White’s The Loves of My Life is a final act from one of queer literature’s most enduring voices. The book reads like a catalogue of encounters, each one polished but weightless. He claims thousands of lovers and reminds us of this constantly, until desire itself becomes a spreadsheet. (One wonders if he kept one, though it likely comes from his books.)

It’s the literary equivalent of being cornered at a party by someone fascinating for the first hour, then slowly realising he’s told the same story three times and still thinks it’s profound.

White’s writing remains graceful, but the insight is gone. He revisits his favourite themes as if rehearsing them rather than rethinking them. The tone is tired, the rhythm mechanical, the candour flattened by habit.

There is a chapter on Stonewall. It is short, factual, and emotionally remote. What should have been witness becomes anecdote. Later, he offers a sermon on rights gained and suffering abroad, a dutiful gesture that feels more like a coda than conviction.

During the chapter on sadomasochism, I found myself wondering on my commute: could a book about gay sex adventures really be this boring? He describes the scene with clinical detachment, then stops mid-flow for a moral reflection on slavery. The thrill dies instantly.

When he reaches the post-AIDS decades, his reflections turn wistful. He notes the return of sexual freedom but from the sidelines, older and heavier, no longer a participant but an archivist. The tone is envy wrapped in philosophy.

Later, he begins cataloguing his own writing. It reads less like reflection and more like record-keeping, the literary equivalent of a man polishing his trophies. His novels are listed, not reconsidered. The self-awareness that once defined him has curdled into self-reference.

Near the end, he turns to love and passion. He declares, again, that he loves easily, that he has loved many, and that bottoms are nicer than tops. It’s meant as tenderness but lands as cliché. The candour that once shocked now feels quaint, the insight replaced by repetition.

I expected raunch and risk, the unapologetic provocation of his earlier work. Here reality can’t reach orgasm. The memoir wheezes where it should burn.

Joel Froomkin’s audiobook narration only heightens the theatre. Each line sounds performed, not lived, the self-importance dressed in applause.

White’s influence on queer writing is undisputed, but The Loves of My Life feels like a farewell written from habit, not hunger. It is gossip drained of heat, a memoir that mistakes recollection for life.