Edmund White has never let any barriers get in his way, not in his public life, not in his writing.

In his upcoming memoir, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir, he chronicles a lifetime of sexual adventures: his furtive explorations with other similarly closeted boys, growing up in the Midwest, his not-unpleasant dalliances with women, in an attempt to “go straight”, his myriad sexual conquests once he had come fully out as a gay man, many of them men who would become the models for characters in his many fine novels. In this new book, White displays his trademark courage for taking on taboo subject matter, here writing so explicitly about sex that one wonders how the reading public in these ridiculously PC, “woke” times will react. But this was Mr. White’s life. And if a writer can’t write about his/her own life, what is he left to write about?

A Previous Life is unlike anything Edmund White has written, In fact, for the first thirty pages or so, I was sure the work couldn’t be White’s. But then the hallmarks of his style emerged: the easy juggling of plotline intricacies, the multi-character interactions, the trademark allusions to world art, classical composers, opera – White could handily depose Ken Jennings on Jeopardy so vast is his knowledge of culture, politics, history.