Photo composite by The Daily Beast/Courtesy Penguin Random House
Of course, Edmund White was writing when this reporter arrived at his Manhattan apartment. The novel-in-progress is called Losing It: A Ghost Story, inspired by a nephew who White had once cared for, and who, at 50, committed suicide. White had been writing poems too, he said, while proffering the bound proof of another novel, The Humble Lover, due to be published in May, about a beguiling male ballet dancer caught up in a multitude of rich-person intrigues.
“I don’t have anything else to do,” White said, smiling, of his relentless production of words.
White, the much-laureled monarch of modern queer literature, is a writing engine of fiction, non-fiction, biographies (including of Jean Genet), and memoirs (including of his time living in France in Our Paris: Sketches From Memory and Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris). Unsurprisingly, in his and husband Michael Carroll’s Chelsea apartment, books are piled high. With mottled daylight struggling to assert itself through the windows, lamps illuminate their spines. The books—old, new, hardback, paperback—are the cushion and covering of every surface. White says he doesn’t suffer from writer’s block or fret over narrative structures, but rather aims for what “Forster called the horizon—the point you want to get to in a book, even if you’re not sure how you’ll get there.”