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Book
Edmund White · 1982
Edmund White wrote A Boy's Own Story (1982) as the first volume of an autobiographical sequence, and its achievement is to render a homosexual adolescence in 1950s America without resolving it into either triumph or tragedy — the boy's longing and his shame arrive in the same breath, and the will to become someone else is the engine under both.
Sequence ladder
Narrative Intelligence sources live outside the figurative image sequence ladder. Adaptive placement applies to image sequences, not this reading library.
Appears in
What this book knows
A boy's homosexual awakening unfolds as a sustained negotiation between shame, longing, and the desperate will to become someone else.
self-and-identity
an account of the one young man most eager to forswear his homosexuality… that foregone predisposition is visible to everyone else in the book
WHITE-BOY-RC-010a playful yet sober young man who's made himself up out of wishes and books
WHITE-BOY-RC-002shame
Somewhere I was storing up merit, accumulating the credit I'd need to buy, one day, the salvation I longed for
WHITE-BOY-RC-112I had been the only boy who'd not sat cross-legged on the gym floor but resting one hand on a hip like the White Rock girl
WHITE-BOY-RC-008erotic-as-power
I dreamed of an English lord who'd kidnap me… someone who'd save me and whom I'd rule
WHITE-BOY-RC-032my need, though usually held in check or released only on imaginary beings, could, if turned on someone real, devour him
WHITE-BOY-RC-093Illuminates
Editor’s framing
The book is a coming-of-age told from inside the period's silence about queer desire, before there was a vocabulary that did not double as a diagnosis. White's narrator wants men and wants, just as urgently, to be the kind of boy who would not — and the negotiation between those two wants is the substance of the book. It is not a liberation narrative. The shame is real, the longing is real, and White refuses to flatter the reader by pretending the boy already knows how the story ends.
What to attend to: the precision with which White renders self-betrayal — the small acts by which the narrator sells out his own desire to be acceptable, and the clarity with which the adult writer sees what the boy could not. The prose is lapidary, almost cool, which makes the heat underneath more legible. Attend to how formation works here: the boy is being made by his shame as much as by his longing.
In Vela's reading this sits beside Baldwin's Another Country and Hollinghurst's The Swimming-Pool Library as the American adolescent pole of the queer-literary inheritance — Baldwin writing desire under the weight of race, Hollinghurst writing it under the weight of class and history, White writing it under the weight of a self the culture had taught to be ashamed. We read it on the self-and-identity and shame axes, where becoming a person and refusing the prescribed self are the same act.
Featured passage
Unlike my idols I couldn’t play tennis or baseball or swim freestyle. My sports were volleyball and Ping-Pong, my only stroke the sidestroke.… My hands were always in the air. In eighth grade I had appeared in the class pageant. We all wore togas and marched solemnly in to a record of Schubert’s “Unfinished.” My sister couldn’t wait to tell me I had been the only boy who’d not sat cross-legged on the gym floor but resting one hand on a hip like the White Rock girl.… A man never gushes; men are either silent or loud. I didn’t know how to swear: I always said the final “g” in “fucking.” III Since Edmund White was born in 1940, he lived in round-number allegorical relation to the last six decades of our recent quick-change century. No intelligence stands readier to remember with perfect pitch a period whole-cloth: who else can tell us so exactly how its citizens then talked, dressed, contracepted, proceeded politically? So, at age forty, just at the start of the sexually liberated eighties (in 1982, the year after HIV first sent its silent tentacles among the erotically adventurous in Manhattan and San Francisco), White offered the world a seemingly autobiographical novel. It appears to map a boy’s coming to terms not simply with solitude, not just with his social destiny, but with a completely aestheticized vision only some scholastical and witty kid could so utterly perfect. The novel shows a child learning to face then exploit not just homo-sex, but sex in general. This work of principled sweep and great observational power also champions the centrality of Art as a governing quest. It offers this view with a faith that must recall Proust’s life project, his attempt to hold all of time, its characters at synchronous ages, all its warring textures, in one head, one work. But crucially, White also places the Erotic on a level of expressive possibility alongside the pursuit of work itself. “Love and Work.” Freud promised us two choices, in that order. But here sex replaces romantic love, even while groping elsewhere for it. If Love, in modern life, is really Sex, then Sex, undertaken with concentration and ambition enough, can ascend to Work, can’t it? The erotic is ranked, by the young man at the center of this fiction, as a great Darwinian organizing force for the good. We are told by White in 1982—using the voice of an erotically and cerebrally advanced fifteen-year-old facing his inaugural analyst—that life’s great divide really seems between those who are sexual, are “getting it” on a regular basis, and the others, lonely and—because silent—powerless:
Unlike my idols I couldn’t play tennis or baseball or swim freestyle. My sports were volleyball and Ping-Pong, my only stroke the sidestroke.… My hands were always in the air.
Read alongside · the magazine
White's rendering of adolescent desire and self-betrayal in the body is one of the cases the essay's argument reads most clearly.
The book holds longing and shame in the same breath — the un-nameable knot the essay is interested in naming.
6 published passages · book excerpt · research analysis
Reader resonance signals for text sources are not wired to this view yet.