Edmund White: 'I try to be honest. If I lose someone's friendship, so what?'

Why a memoirist’s contract with a reader is to tell the truth, and nothing but the truth

I hate the phrase “creative nonfiction.” It sounds like a synonym for lying. You have to tell the truth when you’re writing what purports to be a memoir. I started off writing autobiographical fiction with my third novel, A Boy’s Own Story. That was in 1982. In those days, normal people like me couldn’t write memoirs. You had to be the hero of Iwo Jima or something. The story of someone who’d merely lived and suffered wasn’t sensational enough.

I moved to Paris in 1983. While I was living there, the “normal person memoir” fad began to catch on in the US. Usually the author was someone with a painful childhood. I remember coming back to America on holiday and seeing an ad in The New York Review of Books that said, “Have you been raped as a child? Incested? We can put you on the lecture circuit.” That’s how I knew that memoir was in.

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