Edmund White Returns to Paris with Inside a Pearl

After Our Paris: Sketches from Memory (1995), The Flâneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris (2000), and the "My Europe" section of My Lives: A Memoir (2005), Edmund White today releases his new memoir Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris [Kindle]. Yes, that's a woman seated with him, and, yes, Bloomsbury has degayed the flap copy. Bookforum says, "His portrait of Marie-Claude de Brunhoff…is one of the most affecting depictions of the contours of friendship between a gay man and a straight woman in recent literarature." Don't worry, he hasn't gone soft. As sexually frank as ever, his "grand banquet comes with a delicious roster of cameos—Michel Foucault, Ned Rorem, Milan Kundera, Mary McCarthy, Lauren Bacall, Julian Barnes, Nigella Lawson, Dominique Nabokov, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Azzedine Alaia, Paloma Piccaso…But Inside a Pearl is also a dedication to the lovers and companions and night-time cruisers who get equal footing in the sweeping, Bank-to-Bank narrative…Early along the way, White tests positive for aids, and a trace of flinching mortality underlies the extravagance and dizzying spree that makes Inside the Pearl such an exhilarating ride," according to Interview. Jay Parini in the NYTBR writes, "White is wonderfully tender about his lovers, whom he treats with uniform respect, even melancholy. Indeed a sadness infuses his story . . .This narrative unfolds, for all its frenetic pleasure-seeking, in the shadow of aids . . . [A] beautifully written memoir. . . 'Inside a Pearl' refers not only to Paris, with its mists and mysteries." Library Journal: "A gossipy and enlightening account of living as a gay man among the French intelligentsia . . .White's skillful writing rescues the book from being just another account of an American in Paris." 

Always entertaining in person, he reads tonight at Three Lives in NYC.

Comments

[Bob's Juice]

Sounds interesting,I will search for it.

[Foster Corbin]

The book cover actually is quite appropriate since the woman apparently is Marie-Claude de Brunhoff, the friend who appears more than anyone else in this memoir. Furthermore, anyone who knows of Edmund White surely knows that he is gay.

[Sandy]

Just started this book this evening. Loving it. Why do I forget how much I like Edmund White's books of non-fiction? Every time I pick up one to read, I am swept away. Thanks again, Stephen, for the alert.