Description

Due to rights issues, the audio of this interview is not available online. Please contact San Diego State University, Special Collections and Archives if you wish to be granted access to the original audio. Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory meet with Edmund White in his apartment in Paris for an interview. After a brief discussion of other writers that White admires, the interview begins with a discussion of White’s most recent novel, A Boy’s Own Story. Mentions of truth, beauty and language lead to discussions of White’s other novels, most often States of Desire and Forgetting Elena. White spends much of the interview discussing his own homosexuality, its impact on his writing, the ability to get his writing published, and on his life, including a discussion of his work in the historical context of gay fiction. An edited version of this interview appears on pages 259 to 274 of Alive and Writing: Interviews with American Authors of the 1980s, ed. Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory, 1987, University of Illinois Press.