Synopses & Reviews
When Edmund White moved to Paris in 1983, leaving New York City in the midst of the AIDS crisis, he was forty-three years old, couldn't speak French, and only knew two people in the entire city. But in middle age, he discovered the new anxieties and pleasures of mastering a new culture. When he left fifteen years later to take a teaching position in the U.S., he was fluent enough to broadcast on French radio and TV, and in his work as a journalist, he'd made the acquaintance of everyone from Yves Saint Laurent to Catherine Deneuve to Michel Foucault. He'd also developed a close friendship with an older woman, Marie-Claude, through which he'd come to understand French life and culture in a deeper way.
The books title evokes the Parisian landscape in the eternal mists and the half-light, the serenity of the city compared to the New York White had known (and vividly recalled in City Boy). White fell headily in love with the city and its culture: both intoxicated and intellectually stimulated. He became the definitive biographer of Jean Genet; he wrote lives of Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud; and he became a recipient of the French Order of Arts and Letters. Inside a Pearl recalls those fertile years for White. Its a memoir which gossips and ruminates, and offers a brilliant examination of a city and a culture eternally imbued with an aura of enchantment.
Review
"[White is] one of the most prominent gay writers in the United States, a position he occupies gleefully....Yet 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. This pearl is somehow a kind of snow globe as well, a transparent sphere that encloses a miniature world. White shakes this luminous object. Snow shimmers everywhere. And then the snow settles." New York Times Book Review
Review
"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." Library Journal
Review
"White is an acclaimed novelist, essayist, biographer of Genet and Proust, and a self-described 'archaeologist of gossip.'...[He] is renowned for the purity of his style and for his frank depictions of sex, and he is in peak form here." Booklist
Review
"A memoir that engages on a number of levels, as a pivotal literary figure recounts his productive Parisian years." Kirkus Reviews
About the Author
Edmund White is the author of many novels, including the classic A Boy's Own Story and the most recent Jack Holmes & His Friend; two previous memoirs, My Lives and City Boy; biographies of Jean Genet, Marcel Proust, and Arthur Rimbaud; and several other works of nonfiction, including The Flâneur, about walking Paris. White lives in New York City and teaches writing at Princeton University.