I didn’t talk that much with my cover designer, Laura Duffy, about my novel, A FRIEND OF DOROTHY’S, which I’d hired her to design. I wanted to see what she would come up with on her own. To my surprise, she read the entire book, and was very moved by it, and the cover she came up with was perfect. The novel is set at the height of the AIDS epidemic in gay New York of the 1980s, and Laura managed to capture the sweetness, the nostalgia, and the loss in memories of that time. But she also did something almost uncanny. Without any knowledge of my connection with the earlier book, she echoed in her cover perhaps my favorite gay novel cover of all time, on one of my favorite novels: Edmund White’s A BOY’S OWN STORY
I met Edmund White when that book was published in 1982 and he did a signing at the bookstore where I worked, the Classic Bookshop at 48th Street and Sixth Avenue in New York City. I was too tongue-tied to say much of anything to him, certainly not to admit that I’d found his earlier novel NOCTURNES FOR THE KING OF NAPLES almost unintelligible when I first read it (I later reread it and determined that it’s a masterpiece), but I did manage to tell him that I loved his new book and that the ending had startled and pleased me: a gay boy’s maturation hinges not on something sweet and loving or even specifically sexy, but on something perhaps more universal: vengeance. And he told me the dark ending had surprised even him; he hadn’t seen it coming.
I was collecting such pearls of wisdom from older writers at the time. I had done this thing that seems more audacious in memory: having never even visited the city, I’d moved from Vancouver, Canada, to New York to be a writer. I had been a dual citizen of both countries since birth, and had long nurtured the desire to flee Canada for the States, the only place, I thought, where I could become the literary star I felt destined to be. I was in awe of people like Mr. White not just for their talent but for their fame, their having reached that sought-after pinnacle.
I wrote my one and only novel a few years later, when we’d all become engulfed in a nightmare neither Edmund White nor I could have seen coming. Despite being excerpted a couple places and acquiring an agent who shopped it diligently, my novel would wait even longer, almost forty years, to be published, and then only at my own volition. By that time the AIDS years it depicts, like my youth, were gone. As were these earlier years of being a newcomer to the adult gay world, like White’s narrator, who continued growing up in two more books following A BOY’S OWN STORY. And as much as publishing the book has taken me back to the time in which it’s set, of fear and death and unlikely heroism in the later eighties, revisiting it also takes me back to this time: standing in the bookstore talking with Mr. White while he signed his gorgeous book and thinking: I’m here, I’ve done it, I’ve moved to New York, I’m writing short stories, I’m living the life I dreamt of, and I’m meeting others who have successfully pursued that dream.
So how amazing then to see Laura’s cover for my book and realize that she had unconsciously echoed White’s cover (which he told me he loved). The boy on my book could almost be said to be gazing wistfully back to the boy on White’s.
I feel as if I still want to be Edmund White when I grow up. He died recently, in June of this year, and I missed his passing entirely. He was 85, which makes me no spring chicken myself. But once upon a time I was twenty-one, and he forty, and both of us chatted in the waning September light of a Manhattan bookstore, full, it seems to me in memory, of the amazement of what would come to seem our young lives. And blissfully unaware of the war we were about fight, just over the horizon.