EDMUND WHITE, CA. 2007. PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID SHANKBONE
Edmund White
The Art of Fiction No. 105
Interviewed by Jordan Elgrably
The Paris Review
ISSUE 108, FALL
I first met Edmund White following his move from New York to Paris in 1983. His novel A Boy’s Own Story (1982) had been recommended to me by Odile Hellier, in whose American bookshop, The Village Voice, White was scheduled to read. On the evening of the reading, the upstairs wing of Hellier’s store was packed with curious newcomers. White’s generous and genial personality, as well as his affective reading of his autobiographical novel—the first in a tetralogy dealing with gay experience in America—won White many new readers and inspired me to ask him to sit for an interview for the International Herald Tribune in April, 1984.
