SINCE Edmund White's new autobiography refrains from explaining itself, we can only guess at its intentions. "My Lives" is organized not chronologically but thematically, with chapters entitled "My Shrinks," "My Blonds," "My Hustlers" and so on, ranging loosely over categories of the author's experience. Perhaps White, who is celebrated for a series of autobiographical novels about middle-class gay life beginning with "A Boy's Own Story," feels that he's already related his life once in the usual sequence and the second time around merits a fresh approach. To cite "A Boy's Own Story" alone, the correspondence between White's life and his novels is quite close, down to the name of his father's dog and the brandy Alexanders one of his mother's boyfriends serves her in bed.  White doesn't keep a journal, and so he might have decided he was better off following the meandering currents of memory rather than trying to summon up a linear narrative. Still, the ordering he's chosen is peculiar, with the shrinks chapter coming first, then his father, his mother, the hustlers, "My Women," Europe and Europeans, and continuing until the final chapter about the relationships White considers his forte, "My Friends." He tells us about his first lover  whom he met in Michigan and lived with in New York  after describing 15 years in Paris as an established writer and libertine. The emphasis, too, is eccentric: one long, exhaustive chapter ("My Master") details a fairly recent, short-lived sadomasochistic affair with a much younger man. By contrast, the man with whom White has lived for 10 years in (nonmonogamous) "marital harmony" is mentioned mostly in passing.  In fact, quite a few aspects of White's life and career seem more significant than the reminiscences and character sketches he includes in "My Lives": the French lover whose death in the mid-90's devastated him, his discovery in 1985 that he was HIV-positive, his role in responding to the AIDS pandemic (he was a founder of the Gay Men's Health Crisis) and, especially, his development as a writer, one of the first novelists to treat gay life frankly as a literary subject. Instead of expanding on any of this, he offers his readers, for example, several pages on the French philosopher Michel Foucault, although he maintains that the two of them were "acquaintances, nothing more, and I saw him no more than 30 times altogether in my life."  It's possible that the principle at work here is something elliptical and formalist, like the haute European literature White admires. Such a memoir might be meant to circle around the key events of the author's life without ever settling on any of them. Maybe White thinks this is a better way to sidle up to the truth  just as some people believe you can learn more about others by examining the bric-a-brac in their homes than by listening to anything they say to you directly. The agonies White suffers after separating from the dominant young paramour in "My Master" might be telling us obliquely about his grief for his dead lover and his anxieties about getting old. Certainly, White's suffering after the breakup seems out of proportion with the actual loss and invokes the obsessive unrequited lovers in "The Blue Angel" and "Swann's Way." There is indeed something very Continental about the belief that just because an emotion is extreme and stylized it is also interesting and revealing.  However, the psychic underpinnings of the affair are pretty standard stuff, despite the inventive degradations the two men devise and some eccentric touches. (A kilt fetish! How cute is that?) The sensational detail with which White recounts their erotic games could be a tribute to his transgressive desire, but it could also be a calculated attempt to make the book gossip-worthy. "How about that S-and-M chapter?" you can all too easily imagine people asking each other at cocktail parties.  "My Lives" does bear a resemblance to party chatter and coffee shop confidences. The chapter titles are like conversation topics, and White's digressive elaborations on each theme  full of anecdotes about intellectual celebrities, recreated dialogues and provocative epigrams  are the sort of thing ideal dinner guests produce on demand. How droll that Foucault once asked if White thought he "looked German" and when White said no, the Frenchman "seemed disappointed." In the book's final chapter, the one called "My Friends," White describes his campaign to become popular in his Midwestern high school. It was a charm offensive of the most formidable kind: "I asked my friends endless questions but never pressed too hard. I never led them toward uncomfortable revelations. I praised whatever decision they'd made and sympathized over any indignity they'd suffered. I never offered unwelcome advice. I never reproached them for anything but for being too kind and too generous."  Laura Miller is a staff writer for Salon.com.
In a memoir of life as a gay man and writer, Edmund White falls back on his usual reserves of wit and charm.