Alan Hollinghurst On “A Boy’s Own Story”
Edmund White has published a couple of dozen books, but to me the finest remains his 1982 novel, “A Boy’s Own Story.” Alan Hollinghurst, in an appreciation for a new edition of White’s novel, explains the book’s luminous charm: “‘A Boy’s Own Story, a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic…marked a new direction for White, and confirmed the liberating potential of a closely autobiographical kind of novel, where the testamentary force of memoir is coupled with the artifice of fiction.” Hollinghurst adds: “We see now that ‘A Boy’s Own Story’ appeared at a turning point in the history that White’s later books would unfold, just before the Aids virus violently reconfigured the very world he was describing.”
