C6 Y THE NEW YORK TIMES, TUESDAY, JULY 28, 2020
been “chatting up different boys,” he said,
on the website SilverDaddies. He is prepar-
ing for the release of his latest novel, “A
Saint From Texas,” next month from
Bloomsbury, and he is about halfway fin-
ished writing another one.
It’s coming along quickly, propelled by an
assignment: to prepare new pages every
two days for Giuseppe Gullo, a fan who be-
came a loving friend, and to whom White
dedicated “A Saint From Texas,” a decades-
spanning story of twin sisters who follow di-
vergent paths to Parisian aristocracy and
monastic piety.
White described his current writing pace
as “a little better than average.” He added,
“You have to remember I used to share an
office with Joyce Carol Oates,” the famously
prolific novelist.
Although life in lockdown has been man-
ageable, it has been quiet. White and his
husband, the 55-year-old writer Michael
Carroll, miss being able to host their dinner
parties, gatherings that have become fa-
mous in a certain slice of the literary world,
and that were essential to White’s recovery
from his heart attack in 2014.
When White came home from the hospi-
tal, Carroll became his caretaker, a role he
had been preparing for since they met in the
mid-1990s. Long someone who hated shop-
ping and cooking, Carroll started shopping
and cooking. Knowing he couldn’t handle all
the work alone, he started organizing din-
ner parties with friends — writers such as
Jeffrey Eugenides, who taught with White
at Princeton University.
“Having people come through the apart-
ment brought me out of myself for a little
while,” Carroll said. “But I really did it to
help him. Having a lot of people come in re-
minded Ed that he was valuable.”
There’s no shortage of people who would
want to have dinner with White. He has had
his enemies — particularly Larry Kramer,
one of his co-founders of the Gay Men’s
Health Crisis — but he is widely adored
among fellow writers, gay and straight.
“Edmund is famous for his generosity,
perhaps, and his kindness,” Oates, another
former colleague from Princeton, wrote in
an email. “He is very funny, and friends love
to laugh at his wonderfully entertaining,
‘enhanced’ anecdotes, which have taken on
a life of their own, as you will note if you
have heard them more than once.”
In conversation, he is ready with a dishy
tale about Susan Sontag or any of the hun-
dreds of renowned authors he has be-
friended over the years, followed by a look
of feigned, did-I-just-say-that surprise as he
mischievously covers his mouth.
“He’s puckish,” the author Alexander
Chee said in an interview. “There’s a grin
that he gets as he tells a story or as he lis-
tens to one — a pleasure in the telling or the
listening that is so evident.”
Sometimes a conversation might make
its way into White’s fiction or essays, Gullo
said. “He is interested in every aspect of
life.”
That pleasure White takes in the ex-
change of information — even in inter-
views, he asks as many questions as he is
asked — is also central to his literary criti-
cism, which he prefers to call “apprecia-
tion.”
“There’s a remarkable avidity that has
not dimmed after all this time for the story,
for literature, for reading,” Chee said. “He
just loves it. That always comes through.”
White said he reads for at least two hours
a day. (About five books a week, according
to Carroll.) He rarely writes negative criti-
cism and said he stopped doing it in his 20s,
when he was jealous of other people for get-
ting published. He is more interested in
deep dives into little-known authors such as
Juan Carlos Onetti, whose collected stories
he reviewed for Harper’s in January.
“People are looking for a canon because
they want the absolute limit of books they
need to read to be cultured,” White said.
“But real readers always want new books to
read.”
He is eager for recommendations, and
thrilled to share his latest obsession (José
Maria Eça de Queirós’s “The Maias,” for
those wondering). Often, he describes
books with evocative, one-sentence en-
dorsements; “The Maias,” for example, is
“a very satisfying juxtaposition of the beau-
tiful, lyrical landscape and the vile actions
of a family.” It’s the kind of “epigrammatic
speech,” Oates said, that would make him
ideal for Twitter.
Indeed he did sign up, but almost immedi-
ately his account was hacked. “Which was
good for Edmund, I see retrospectively,”
Oates said. “He would have quickly
amassed a huge following on Twitter and
perhaps frittered his time away distracted
by his admiring followers.”
If White were on social media, he would-
n’t have much to say about himself that he
hasn’t already published — with candor and
what Oates described as a “lack of protec-
tiveness.” He rose to fame in 1982 with “A
Boy’s Own Story,” the first installment in an
autobiographical trilogy that traces his life
from childhood to the Stonewall riots and
the devastation of AIDS, a loss he likened to
the one-by-one departure of players from
the stage in Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony.
In the late 1970s, he was part of the Violet
Quill, an informal group of gay male au-
thors. They casually staked claims on spe-
cific types of queer stories: White focused
on his youth; while Robert Ferro wrote
about the family; and Andrew Holleran,
with “Dancer From the Dance,” became a
chronicler of Fire Island culture.
“Gay fiction before that, Gore Vidal and
Truman Capote, was written for straight
readers,” White said. “We had a gay reader-
ship in mind, and that made all the differ-
ence. We didn’t have to spell out what Fire
Island was.”
Writers from the Violet Quill were pio-
neers, but like many published novelists of
the time, they still wrote from a narrow —
which is to say, white, and often moneyed —
perspective. Queer literature has since
blossomed with other voices: Édouard Lou-
is’s fiction is as much about class; Ocean
Vuong’s “On Earth We’re Briefly Gor-
geous,” as much about immigration and
drug abuse.
In that sense, “A Boy’s Own Story” has
become more significant for its historical
importance than its urgency. Brandon Tay-
lor, the 31-year-old author of “Real Life,” re-
membered being a teenager searching for
gay novels to read and repeatedly coming
across it as an essential book.
Today, though, White “isn’t a touchstone
for people I consider my peers,” Taylor said.
That doesn’t mean he isn’t influential,
though. “When you see a book about a
queer Midwestern coming-of-age,” Taylor
added, “it’s hard not to see his hands all over
that.”
What Taylor and other young gay writers
— even White himself — don’t take for
granted is that queer fiction is nowhere
near as marginalized as in the days when
publishers saw novels like “A Boy’s Own
Story” as too risky.
If anything, both the industry and the
academy have come around on White’s
body of work, from “The Joy of Gay Sex” to
his indispensable biography of Jean Genet
and novels of virtuosic craft like “Hotel de
Dream,” White’s favorite. Last year, the Na-
tional Book Foundation gave him its award
for lifetime achievement; in 2018, he earned
a similar honor from PEN America.
“He has received major recognition,”
Chee said. “But I think we are still in the
process of learning how important he has
always been.”‘Hyper-Vulnerable,’ With Stories to Tell
ERIK T. KAISER/PATRICK McMULLAN, VIA GETTY IMAGESKARSTEN MORAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESSEPTEMBER DAWN BOTTOMS/THE NEW YORK TIMES‘There’s a grin that he
gets as he tells a story or
as he listens to one — a
pleasure in the telling or
the listening that is so
evident.’
ALEXANDER CHEE
ABOUT EDMUND WHITE
CONTINUED FROM PAGE C1
Top, from left, the novelists
Jhumpa Lahiri, Edmund
White and Joyce Carol Oates
in 2005; left, White
co-founded the Gay Men’s
Health Crisis; above, White’s
“A Saint From Texas”; and
below, the filmmaker John
Waters, left, greeting White
at a ceremony in 2019.by a local news crew.
The murder of Trethewey’s mother fol-
lowed months of beatings and threats by
Joel. Gwendolyn and Natasha escaped to
hotels and shelters. It is among this book’s
ironies that Gwendolyn had a master’s in
social work, and made more money than the
shelter employees. “Maybe you can help me
get a job,” one of the workers said to her.
This is a book with a slow, steady build.
This is restraint in service to release.
Among its first scenes is that of the author’s
birth in Gulfport, Miss., in 1966. Her father
was a white man, a future academic born in
Nova Scotia. The author was thus, she
writes, “a child of miscegenation, an inter-
racial marriage still illegal in Mississippi
and in as many as 20 other states.”
Trethewey was born on the hundredth
anniversary of Confederate Memorial Day,
which paid homage to the Lost Cause. As
her mother made the trip to Gulfport Me-
morial Hospital, the author writes, she
could not help but witness “the barrage of
rebel flags lining the streets: private citi-
zens, lawmakers, Klansmen (often one and
the same) raising them in Gulfport and
small towns all across Mississippi.”
When Trethewey was young and out with
her parents, she grew used to hostility. This
often crossed the line into intimidation. Men
followed them out of shops. There was the
“stream of headlights searching the front
windows of the house at night” and “sexu-ally charged calls from white men driving
by in broad daylight.” The Klan burned a
cross in the family’s driveway.
After her divorce from the author’s father,
who had grown distant while finishing his
studies in New Orleans, Gwendolyn moved
with Natasha to Atlanta, hoping for a better
life.
This memoir has eddies of joy and cele-
bration. Trethewey writes memorably
about the music Gwendolyn loved. She de-
scribes a photograph of her mother and Joel
in which they “look like performers in a
1970s soul band, bell-bottoms and Afros,
both of them posed with one hand on the
stair railing and one foot trailing behind on
the step as if they are walking in unison
down the stairs.”
They’re both dressed in white, she adds,
“like Al Green on the album cover propped
up against the wall.”
By its midpoint, “Memorial Drive” is
merely a quite good memoir. The book’s sec-
ond half, like the wall of a hurricane after the
eye calmly passes over, is the destructor.
The second half, unexpectedly, dumps a
bag of harrowing receipts on the table.
Thanks to a police officer who had been the
first on the scene, Trethewey has access to
transcripts of her mother’s police state-
ments before her murder; transcripts of
telephone calls with Joel that Gwendolyn
taped, in hopes of getting an arrest war-
rant; and a short journal her mother kept.
Trethewey dispenses this material to
powerful effect. Some readers will be put in
mind of Norman Mailer’s epic “The Execu-
tioner’s Song,” about the surreal events sur-rounding the execution of the convicted
killer Gary Gilmore in Utah in the 1970s.
On the telephone recordings, Gwendolyn
hangs on as Joel says things like: “You cre-
ated this monster inside of me. It’s your
baby, it’s yours”; “I have embedded these
things in my head that only you can take
out”; “Gwen, you forgot I spent two years in
Vietnam. I can explode anything”; “I’m
gonna come out there and I’m gonna shoot a
round through the window, OK. All right?”
Gwendolyn did get an arrest warrant.
Joel killed her after a cop left his post before
his shift was up. One of the bullets went
through her raised right hand and into her
head. “Memorial Drive” closes like a door
sucked shut by the wind.
Among this memoir’s themes is the de-
velopment of the author’s sensibility, her
solitude of spirit. She is honest about what
she remembers and what she does not.
“If you had told me early on how much of
my life I would lose to forgetting — most of
those years when my mother was still alive
— maybe I’d have begun then trying to save
as much as I could.” She had to jettison a lot,
she writes, “out of a kind of necessity.”
Even though you intuit what is coming,
the moment you learn of Gwendolyn’s death
is as stunning as the moment when Anna
Magnani is shot in the street in Roberto
Rossellini’s “Rome, Open City.”
Rita Dove said this about memory in a
poem called “Primer for the Nuclear Age”:
if you’ve
got a heart at all, someday
it will kill you.DWIGHT GARNER BOOKS OF THE TIMESRecalling a Southern Birth, and a Mother’s Murder
NANCY CRAMPTONCONTINUED FROM PAGE C1Follow Dwight Garner on Twitter:
@DwightGarner.Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir
By Natasha Trethewey
211 pages. Ecco. $27.99.
This is a book with a
slow, steady build.
This is restraint in
service to release.