Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris - Hardcover

"Edmund White might be a rare person of letters in an old-fashioned sense." --Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers

"[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." --Jay Parini, New York Times Book Review

"White proves once again, like a scopophiliac in a hall of mirrors, that he is the unrivaled master of nailing down a time, a place, a mood, and its walking, talking, erring, outrageous denizens... White's 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 a Pearl such an exhilarating ride. White has set to page the ins and outs of Paris before--particularly in his literary walking guide, The Flaneur, in 2001. But he's never written about the city with such an expert mix of anthropology and vulnerability." --Interview

"What is fascinating about Inside a Pearl [is] its game effort at self-examination and its commitment to warts-and-all sharing about sexual aging, social arrivism, and the brutal sadness caused by AIDS...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." --Bookforum

"The memories of high-profile artists, fashion designers, actors and socialites are loose-lipped, uproarious tales of the louche and famous." --The New York Times Style Magazine

"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

"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

"A memoir that engages on a number of levels, as a pivotal literary figure recounts his productive Parisian years." --Kirkus Reviews

"Provide[s] insightful glimpses of Paris in the late 20th century." --Publishers Weekly

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 book's 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. It's a memoir which gossips and ruminates, and offers a brilliant examination of a city and a culture eternally imbued with an aura of enchantment.