Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris

By Edmund White

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'Paris may well be White's pearl, but he is in fact the real pearl ... This wonderfully eccentric, conversational and personalised cultural history contains the essence of Edmund White … Entertaining and wry, White is worldly-wise and wise' - Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

'Edmund White writing about his Paris years, with walk-on parts for Catherine Deneuve, Yves Saint-Laurent and other assorted members of the French glitterati? That'd be Inside a Pearl' – Scotsman

'We are lucky to have him still publishing … diverting, affectionate … and full of tips' - London Evening Standard
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A literary treat of a memoir, covering Edmund White's years among the cultural and intellectual elite of 1980s Paris

Edmund White was forty-three years old when he moved to Paris in 1983. He spoke no French and knew just two people in the entire city, but soon discovered the anxieties and pleasures of mastering a new culture. White fell passionately in love with Paris, its beauty in the half-light and eternal mists; its serenity compared with the New York he had known.

Intoxicated and intellectually stimulated by its culture, he became the definitive biographer of Jean Genet, wrote lives of Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud. Frequent trips across the Channel to literary parties in London begot friendships with Julian Barnes, Alan Hollinghurst, Martin Amis and many others. When he left, fifteen years later, to return to the US, he was fluent enough to broadcast on French radio and TV, and as a journalist had made the acquaintance of everyone from Yves St Laurent to Catherine Deneuve to Michel Foucault. He'd also developed a close friendship with an older woman, Marie-Claude, through whom he'd come to a deeper understanding of French life.

Inside a Pearl vividly recalls those fertile years, and offers a brilliant examination of a city and a culture eternally imbued with an aura of enchantment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Feb 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9781408837863

Edmund White

<p>Edmund White is the author of the novels <em>Fanny: A Fiction</em>, <em>A Boy's Own Story</em>, <em>The Farewell Symphony</em>, and <em>The Married Man</em>; a biography of Jean Genet; a study of Marcel Proust; and, most recently, a memoir, <em>My Lives</em>. Having lived in Paris for many years, he has now settled in New York, and he teaches at Princeton University.</p>

Reviews for Inside a Pearl

[heggiep · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I stuck it out 'til the end but, after finishing the book, thought, "Man, I could have read a Conrad, Greene, or Ford novel instead." The one-and-a-half stars is for the good binding.

[opinionated_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The first half of this memoir is interesting. Edmund White is very wary of not being Theodore Zeldin. The admired historian wrote a book called "The French" (and very good fun it is too) analysing French traits and characteristics, which his fellow French hated. White clearly doesn't want this fate to befall him; he also clearly doesn't want his book to be the Parisian equivalent of "My Year in Provence". So what to do? He tries to focus on the French people he'd known and loved, but does occasionally fall into the Zeldin trap, and quite honestly the book is better when he does and because of this the first 150 pages are lively and amusing. The second half of the book though generates into a list of Mr White's relationships, their untimely demise in most cases, and who he had dinner with. There are some very poignant and moving passages; but also quite a bit of filler. The reader is left with little idea of what Mr White actually did in Paris - his work, his writing etc. Instead we get many pages of seemingly random reminiscences. So whilst I enjoyed parts of the book very much I did find it uneven

[chatterbox_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a wildly erratic and uneven memoir of the author's years spent living in Paris. At its worst, it's little more than a series of tedious series of encounters with famous celebrities, as the author blithely name-drops hither and yon, telling us of this dinner with that famous individual, and that big party where he saw so and so do such and such. Yawn. Even worse is when he digresses completely -- eg "I had to fly to Mexico City to interview the ageing movie diva Maria Felix. She kept me waiting for a day while she washed her hair." What?? Or: the anecdote of travelng overnight in Jordan to catch a plane while the driver tells him about his unhappy marriage to a Texan "whose parents insisted he must be a Mexican since had a funny accent and was tan." These might be mildly amusing dinner party anecdotes for White's friends; they didn't work at all for me. In fact, even though I'm familiar or knowledgeable with many of the names he drops so resoundingly (not personally, but in the sense of having read their work, or seen it, etc.), hearing these endless anecdotes flow out from White's pen felt like being stuck in a corner with someone breathlessly recounting the last 20 years of their life to you, one day at a time. "And then I did this..." "And then she said that..." After a point, one simply stops caring about WHO it is that he's talking about and simply end up bored and exhausted. Unless you're a devotee of gossip. White is: he calls himself an archaelogist of gossip. I'm not. Nor am I interested in the minutiae of anyone else's sex life, or the gay sex scene in Paris of the time, including when/how to cruise for sex in Paris, or the anatomical details. If I know the people involved, I'm interested because of them; if not, it's neither interesting nor titillating, in part because White doesn't expand this to say anything broader about European sexual mores in any interesting or significant way. (He's better at making that kind of leap when talking about stuff like personal style, or friendship, or food, however.)But then, in between all this stuff that bored me, there are White's thoughtful and moving observations of the friends he made, especially Marie-Claude de Brunhoff, and his thoughts about Paris itself -- a city "full of things an older person likes -- books, food, museums." Occasionally, I'd stumble over perfect phrases or analyses: "Painting -- and heavily subsidized arts like ballet and poetry and "serious" music -- were obliged to be avant-garde in order to seem flamboyantly original. Fiction and theater, which were expected to earn their own keep, had to maintain a broader appeal." That, he notes, is one reason why writers "who had to please so many more culture consumers, many of them with brows firmly in the middle." A wonderful phrase! Later, he writes of one acquaintance that he "devoured books the way other people ate croissants -- one or two daily." So, I'm left divided in my thoughts about this book, and White in general. I tend to dislike this arch and sometimes camp tone; the emphasis on style and panache -- and yet beneath it runs a vein of immense substance and the two appear inseparable. He often comes across as a garrulous busybody who derives a sense of his own importance from all the Big Names he knows. (It takes less than a page for him to start dropping them and he never stops...) I did expect this to be a memoir, but Paris is almost incidental. Yes, Paris shapes the people who dominate the memoir, but even so, these aren't ordinary people; many of them are cross-cultural celebrities. Having spent large chunks of my life in Northern Europe, France and -- yes -- Paris, I wouldn't recommend this as a book about what it's like to live there. It's what it's like to live in one corner of the literary beau monde, where how you look and the caliber of your dinner party chatter is significant. That's not le tout Paris, any more than is, say, the Louvre and romantic novels about Marie Antoinette.White is clearly witty, intelligent, and a wry observer of it all. He understands how differently the French define friendship -- and captures the distinction in a few pithy phrases. He nails the reason why the Brits and the French may always struggle with mutual incomprehension: it's the absence among the latter of a sense of the ridiculous, which deflates. This is a lot of words devoted to sorting out my thoughts about the book. It's not one I'm likely to re-read, and one that left me wrinkling my nose with dislike a chunk of the time, but on the other hand, there are moments when it all clicks together. If you're the kind of person who reads social diaries and is as curious in the "who" as well as the "where" and the "what", then you'll find this amusing. But even if you're just looking for the literary element -- yes, there are references to Hollinghurst, to White's bio of Genet, etc. etc. -- it's a small subset of the book and I don't think warrants the time and attention required to read the whole thing. Borrow it and skim through it if you must, using an index as a guide, but don't think you'll be missing much

[sigmundfraud · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Edmund White is one of my most favorite writers. I especially like his fictional autobiographical trilogy. Edmund has had a very interesting life both in New York and Paris. He has been out as a homosexual for ever and for that I admire him. He has few if any pretenses. His most recent book INSIDE A PEARL: MY YEARS IN PARIS is just that.The book lacks a center but it is a collection of episodes and ancedotes of Edmund's life in Paris where he knew everybody who was anybody and he has plenty to say about them. I enjoyed the book because i enjoy Edmund but he has written many much better books but that is not meant to discourage you from reading INSIDE A PEARL.

[freelancer_frank · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a book about life in France in the eighties, specifically the lives of a certain cultural and intellectual elite. White is frank, amusing, poetic and deliciously forthright in his accounts of interactions, both with the famous and the unknown. The book has the slimmest of narrative threads, but it does not really need one, such is the intricacy and intrigue of White's adventures and character portraits.

[jbarr5 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Inside of a Pearl, Life in Paris by Edmund WhiteA journalist has left NY in the 80's and moves to Paris where he only knows 2 people. He learns all about the lifestyle and how to survive.Gay sex scenes. I had wanted to read this book because I love pearls and I have always wanted to travel to Paris, which we have (in TN). The structure of the Eiffel Tower has always fascinated me.This book has a bit too much scenes which I don't wish to read about so I've not finished the book.I received this book from National Library Service for my BARD (Braille Audio Reading Device).

[litalex · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A good read and a very comprehensive look at his Paris years, though I don't know 95% of the people he was name-dropping.

[dbsovereign · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is an interesting, anecdotal recounting of White’s time in Paris. He spends a lot of time talking about his friends and lovers there, their parties/dinners and the lessons he learned about the city and the French. As with any expat, he also gains insight into his own country (USA) and its culture. This is also an ode to Marie-Claude de Brunhoff - a literary hostess, artist and critic - and their friendship. While in Paris White also says goodbye to his youth. He loves to name drop and bemoans the fact that he is more famous in Europe than in his own country. I would recommend this to anyone who wants to find out more about White and French culture.