A Previous Life: Another Posthumous Novel was published by Bloomsbury in 2022. The novel’s conceit is that it is a manuscript found after the death of its author — Edmund White himself, or a character very like him. The narrative follows an elderly American writer, Constance, and his much younger Italian-Sicilian husband, Ruggero, as they spend time together in a European apartment reading aloud to each other from their respective sexual memoirs.
The novel is structured as a series of embedded narratives: Constance reads Ruggero his account of past lovers (male and female), and Ruggero reads Constance his own (also male and female). The readings provoke jealousy, arousal, philosophical discussion, and confrontation. Each partner must reckon with the other’s past — a past that includes pleasures, betrayals, and intensities that the current relationship can never replicate or erase.
White’s characteristic themes converge here: the relationship between sex and knowledge, the impossibility of fully knowing another person, the way desire persists into old age even as the body declines, the competition between memory and present experience. The novel is explicit — White has never been coy about sexual description — but the explicitness serves philosophical purposes: these bodies and their histories are the material from which identity is constructed.
The subtitle — “Another Posthumous Novel” — signals awareness of mortality and literary legacy. White, in his eighties when the book was published, presents it as a kind of last testament: a final statement about love, sex, aging, and the impossibility of closure.
Collecting A Previous Life
First edition (Bloomsbury, New York, 2022): Hardcover, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$30
- Signed: $30–$60