Edmund White's The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir

Tonight I’ll read an excerpt from Edmund White’s recently published The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir. Edmund is a close friend of mine, and my favorite page in this book is the dedication page, which reads: To Rick Whitaker. Be advised that you will hear some vivid descriptions of gay sex, so if you wish not to fall asleep with such stuff in your head, you might want to skip this episode. Most of my friends will undoubtedly listen to it repeatedly. But if you’re OK with gay sex, I invite you to close your eyes, calm yourself down, relax completely, and let yourself be taken away, while I read to you, for a peaceful night of rejuvenating, healthy, deep sleep. I’ll read from The Loves of My Life for about half an hour. By the time I’ve finished, I expect you’ll be either wide awake and ordering a copy of the book, or sound asleep: Literate sleep.

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About the Podcast

Literate Sleep

A nocturnal podcast by Rick Whitaker

Rick Whitaker, author and host of the nocturnal podcast Literate Sleep, reads aloud from literary texts that you can enjoy while falling asleep. These are not cliffhangers or thrillers. They’re citizens of the low country, content to amble along to see whatever happens to be there--fabulous but fully self-evident literary landscapes without the promise of climax, epiphany, or resolution. These texts could go on, it seems, forever, which is not to say that they’re boring. They're not. Among the writers whose work will be featured in future episodes are, for instance, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Lynch, W. G. Sebald, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, Richard Howard, Ronald Firbank, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Marcel Proust, Toni Morrison, William James, Edith Hamilton, and the list could go on and on--you could be put to sleep by the list itself. But as a reader with a severe allergy to boredom, Rick Whitaker will always strive to put you to sleep with texts that will not bore you. In his quiet readings without music, these literary texts will lull you, pacify you, and induce you to sweet, smart dreams. The first episode is a reading of a 1913 story by the Swiss writer Robert Walser. Born in 1878, Walser was a dropout from school at 14. In his 50s he retired to a sanatorium where, he said, he went “not to write, but to be mad.” "Kleist in Thun" is his homage to the German poet Heinrich von Kleist. Following the Walser story, a page from James Joyce's famously inscrutable novel Finnegans Wake. But you’ll be sound asleep by then. Literate sleep.

About your host

Rick Whitaker

Rick Whitaker is an author and producer in New York City. He created the podcast "Read Me to Sleep, Ricky" in 2022-23. He directs Everybody Sing, a community choir, and works at Columbia University's Italian Academy for Advanced Studies.