"Some people celebrate turning 85 with grandchildren, gardening or a nice cake. White has published a gaspingly graphic, jaunty and tender sex memoir: a guided tour of gay desire in which libido is the wellspring of just about everything." -New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)
"White once estimated he'd had three thousand partners . . . and his prose here, as ever, is so redoubtably stylish that I almost wish he'd enshrined every last tryst in print . . . Line for line, I can't recall the last time I enjoyed reading anything so much." -Harper's Magazine
"Gaspingly graphic, jaunty and tender...It's far from a solemn capstone to White's long and distinguished career. More like a mischievous
rock-skipping in the moonshadow....excavatory and excellent...In the current political climate, twisting back toward repression, The Loves of My Life, slim as it is, lands louder and prouder than it otherwise might have." -
New York Times"The novelist Edmund White lived through the furtive 1950s, when being gay was a crime; the brief, exuberant post-Stonewall years; and the decade when AIDS tore through his community of friends and lovers. But this outline is far more serious than White's joking and explicit memoir, in which pleasure is always the goal...It's all sexy, funny, and romantic, too." -
Vulture, "The Best Books of 2025 (So Far)""Blunt, raunchy, explicit, nostalgic, and unapologetically sex-forward, this memoir will excite, enchant, delight, and, perhaps most of all, make the reader truly appreciate everything that is Edmund White." -
Bay Area Reporter"As juicy, ebullient, and ecstatic as [White's] best novels." -
The Observer"With his trademark irreverence, White celebrates more than six decades of sex in a candid memoir that doubles as an indispensable work of queer history . . . Delightfully raunchy and affecting, this steamy account is full of pleasures." -
Publishers Weekly, starred review"In crisply written episodes laced with a wry sense of humor about his own shortcomings and social foibles, White remains a talented, carnally flagrant raconteur whose memoir thumps with the palpably racing heartbeat of life, sex, love, and unbridled desire. An irreverent and unapologetically provocative scrapbook of an aging author's sex life." -
Kirkus Reviews, starred review"I don't know anyone, except Edmund White, who's had 'thousands of sex partners.' I definitely don't know anyone who writes so ebulliently about former lovers. In his panoply of sexual encounters, Edmund White's love of sex makes us proud to be human. And the story of his sex life reads like a beautifully crafted, very moving (and very funny!) novel." -
John Irving"Ecstatic, so funny, tender, very hot - a scintillating romp with a literary lion. Daddy's diary fully delivers, pungent and real, teeming with gasp-worthy disclosures, as illuminating as it is filthy." -
Jeremy Atherton Lin, author of GAY BAR and DEEP HOUSE"Edmund White's
The Loves of My Life is a raw, frightening, funny, and beautiful testimony, brimming with transgressive wisdom. White asks all the right questions, forcing me to expand much of what I imagined about desire and longing. There's so much of the under-examined (sex) life laid bare here-enough to make grown folks blush. But it was the skilled explorations of the twin demons of hatred and self-hatred that broke me down and broke me open.
The Loves of My Life is an invaluable historical understanding of how gay men navigate perpetually hostile terrain and sometimes manage to avoid its death traps." -
Robert Jones, Jr., New York Times bestselling author of THE PROPHETS, a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction"Nearly 50 years after the great Edmund White co-authored
The Joy of Gay Sex, we get even
more joy, more candor, and more of White's peerless literary style in a witty and highly personal memoir devoted to a lifelong love of sex, and of sex and love. Fabulous-and inspiring!" -
Bill Hayes, author of IINSOMNIAC CITY: NEW YORK, OLIVER, AND ME"Balletic in its horniness." -
Jami Attenberg, author of THE MIDDLESTEINS"Exhaustively wonderful. An unflinching, romantic, and generous climax by a bright star in our literary constellation. The gayest book ever written." -
Henry Hoke, author of OPEN THROAT"One of the patron saints of queer literature, a new book from Edmund White is always a cause for celebration.
The Loves of My Life feels like the culmination of a profound wisdom - wry, hilarious, moving, and brilliantly unreserved. This litany of lovers becomes a sort of community in itself, full of vitality and difference. White is still breaking taboos in the most joyous and virtuoso style." -
Seán Hewitt, author of ALL DOWN DARKNESS WIDE"The books by 80-year-old American novelist, memoirist and essayist Edmund White-honest, fierce and joyful explorations of love, sex and family-have been breaking boundaries and engaging readers for nearly 50 years." -
AARP"[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"White relates encounters in vivid detail, as if glorying in their mundanity, but existential truths nonetheless rise to the surface: being gay is what allowed him to survive his upbringing; the victory of Stonewall 'permitted us to put our creative energies into something other than simply enduring.' Character portraits emerge too, often in a sole sentence, especially, of course, of the author himself, and his life in love and writing." -
Booklist"It's a love letter to all the things great and small, beautiful and ugly, about queer sex and the culture around it. It's also a fascinating vignette of gay culture in America for the past 70-odd years. A true can't miss from one of the American gay literary canon's greats." -
Pride, "Our 10 most anticipated LGBTQ+ books of 2025""There is no man better suited to talk about the ins and out of gay sex than Edmund White." -
Interview Magazine, "'Tall Blonde With a Big Dick': 18 Men Ask Edmund White Some Sexy Questions""The 85-year-old White recounts six decades of love and sex in this candid and erotic memoir, crafting a landmark work of queer history in the process. Seminal indeed." -
The Millions, "Most Anticipated""A brilliant, envelope-pushing memoir that explores how we have sex and why . . . To any White superfan (which this reviewer is),
The Loves of My Life is a must-read. To those not inducted, this rousing memoir still provides intriguing, fresh ideas about how we connect. Ultimately, pleasure reigns supreme." -
BookPage, "Most Anticipated Nonfiction""In a time where young people are supposedly squeamish about sex, Edmund White's new memoir relishes in describing his seven-plus decades of explicit encounters. The celebrated 85-year-old writer's humorous and revealing tour through his sexual and romantic past also functions as a unique oral history of queer culture, as he remembers intimate moments from his closeted youth in the 1950s Midwest, through the Stonewall era and height of HIV, to the thoroughly modern practice of app dating." -
W Magazine, "Most Anticipated Nonfiction""[White] remains an astonishingly elegant stylist, with a genius for similes. His witty details are always buffed to high polish. It's a briny pleasure to read about outré sex in sentences as baroque as peonies, as smooth as eggnog. Gossamer prose and ramrod honesty are White's dual credos, and each is made peculiar and fresh by the presence of the other." -
Sasha Archibald, 4Columns
