Edmund White opened the door, took one look at my blood-covered face and hands, and called softly for his husband Michael Carroll. “Oh my goodness, what happened?” White asked. Moments before, I had opened the door to White’s Manhattan apartment block’s inner stairwell (healthy me, taking the stairs), slipped and bashed my head square against the concrete wall (not so healthy me, I’ll take the elevator next time). A deep gash immediately started seeping blood. Carroll, the gentle hero of the hour, cleaned me up and took me to the hospital.

 The line of the day, of course, was White’s. As I stood bleeding on his living room carpet, he said, “Is there anything I can do?” I was in the dazed act of bleeding and didn’t answer. White, 74, thought for a moment. “Would you like a root beer?” he suddenly said, then went off to the fridge, purloined a bottle, opened it and passed it to my bloody right hand and so as I bled I sipped root beer, White gently smiling. Well, if I have a serious head injury, this must count as the best last moment of clarity, I thought.

 You would know how good White is with words, how precise, clever and mischievous, if you’ve ever read his many books, from A Boy’s Own Story, the 1980s coming out classic, to his masterful biography of Jean Genet, to his many memoirs, including now Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris. In the 1970s he wrote States of Desire, a kind of road-trip around gay America, and co-wrote The Joy of Gay Sex, which he was, and remains, eminently well-qualified to write about. 
If you’ve read White, you’ll have read about the hustlers young and old, the public sex, the sex everywhere, and his time as an SM slave to a much-younger master. Alongside Armistead Maupin, he is one of America’s best-known gay writers. He is a professor of creative writing at Princeton and, among his many awards, is an Officier de l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

 Inside a Pearl isn’t the first time White has taken readers to Paris, where he lived from 1983 to 1998: he has published one book on the delights of being a flaneur there, and another with Hubert Sorin, a much-loved former partner, who supplied sketches of the most treasured elements of their life there.
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