Original Youth: The Real Story of Edmund White's Boyhood - Hardcover

There is much to be learned and untangled in the true story of Edmund White's own boyhood - the weirdness and extent of his young sex life, the depth of both his occasional despair and treachery, and the intellectual and artistic brilliance that White displayed so early on.
Forced from the age of three to be best friend and "advisor" to his unhinged, divorced mother, fearful of his imperious father yet also sexually attracted to him, White evolved into a teenager who was at once a Buddhist, a cruiser of hustlers and married men, an "A" student, an FBI drug informant, a writer of plays and novels, a wily seducer of classmates, and someone who could be so defiant that he shocked his mother by informing her he wished to marry her boyfriend's son. White also anguished about his homosexuality, at one point demanding that his parents send him to a psychoanalyst to be "cured."
Drawing on extensive interviews with those closest to "Eddie," and on revealing letters such as those between his divorved parents in which more than one family secret is exposed, Original Youth is a relentlessly readable biography that is breathtakingly honest in its portrayal of its subject. Informed throughout by intimate, probing interviews with White himself that can be found nowhere else, the final result is an eloquently written and sure-footed work that neither exploits White nor suffers from being a cozily "authorized" biography.