«I JUST READ EVERYTHING»

When I ask (Edmund) White how he has come to mine his own life in different forms, he says that fiction and non-fiction offer different contracts with the reader. "In a memoir, your main contract with the reader is to tell the truth, no matter how bizarre. In a novel, I think you have a contract with the reader to make the character representative – of a moment in history, a social class… for instance, I wanted to make the boy in A Boy's Own Story more like other gay men of my generation in their youth and not like me. I was very precocious, both sexually and intellectually. I mean, I'd had sex with a couple of hundred people by the time I was 16. I was an obsessive-compulsive sex maniac. But I didn't put that in because I thought: that's so freaky. There would only be two other people in the world who would identify with me."In a memoir, no such difficulty. White is fearless in his relaying of carnal details and omnivorous in his reading habits. He tells you about the "trick towel" he used to put under his pillow for wiping up after his one-night stands ("one man or 10"), about how he dated his clap doctor, and almost as much about his platonic communions with Tolstoy and Donald Barthelme. His career, as Alan Hollinghurst put it, has been "dedicated to sexual truth-telling".

The Guardian
Jan 3 2010