Edmund White
Edmund White
Edmund Valentine White IIIis an American novelist, memoirist, and an essayist on literary and social topics. Much of his writing is on the theme of same-sex love. Probably his best-known books are The Joy of Gay Sexand his trio of autobiographic novels, A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Emptyand The Farewell Symphony...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth13 January 1940
CountryUnited States of America
felt gay great handed life record scarcely strange though truth wrote
I've always been impelled to say the truth. When I was 14, in 1954, I already wrote a gay novel, though I'd never read one. I felt that life handed me a great subject, gay life, that had scarcely been examined, and I was impelled to record it in all its strange detail.
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But if all these things were the bits of tinsel and straw I made my nest out of, the way I felt while I worked was strangely different.
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The most important things in our intimate lives can't be discussed with strangers, except in books.
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Paradoxically, since gay men rarely have gay parents, cultural transmission must come from friends or strangers (a problem since the generations so seldom mix in gay life).
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In his enigmatic and cunning story 'The Crown of Feathers,' Isaac Bashevis Singer refuses to produce uncontradictory evidence of God's will but rather mixes all signals, jams the evidence, stalls every conclusion.
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Nothing lasts in New York. The life that is lived there, however, is as intense as it gets.
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The natural enmity between leaver and left is like the absolute, immediate and always shifting hostility between driver and pedestrian.
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I'm not such a fan of imagination. If you're alive to details, they oftentimes suggest a richer or deeper imaginative line than you would have imagined.
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I never liked my father. He really was a dullard and misanthrope. My mother and he were married for 22, years and it was an ill match. She encouraged me to be a writer. She opened her home to black friends, and this was the 1950s. She didn't care later when I write about her.
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In a memoir, your main contract with the reader is to tell the truth, no matter how bizarre.
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Early on, after gay liberation, there was an almost Stalinist pressure from gay critics and even gay readers to write about positive role models. We were never supposed to write negative things about gays, or else we were seen as collaborating with the enemy.
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Europeans forget that one-third of the American people have had a personal conversation with Jesus Christ and that the born-again are not just little old ladies in black but also CEOs and provosts of universities and candidates for office.
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First, I was opposed to gay marriage because it seemed like one more way that gays were wanting to assimilate. When I realized the Christian right was so opposed to it, as well as tyrannical governments in Africa and Russia, I thought, 'It must be a good thing to fight for.'
novel novelist straight
A straight writer can write a gay novel and not worry about it, and a gay novelist can write about straight people.