Biographers approach autobiography with considerable suspicion. I speak from experience, having had to parse my way through Lillian Hellman’s memoirs while trying to bookkeep her life. She took the writer’s penchant for turning fact into fiction – everything is fodder for a good story – to its highest power.

Edmund White is surely one of the most open and forthcoming writers ever to enter the autobiography-biography complex that has been developing over the past 250 years, and “My Lives” (Ecco, 368 pages, $25.95) demonstrates this. Unlike many novelists, Mr. White is not wary of revealing too much. Indeed, he is as promiscuous in his fiction and nonfiction as he is in his sexual life. So he freely identifies friends who have served as models for his autobiographical fiction. He includes photos and luscious descriptions of lovers past and present. And he becomes so detailed about the 180 times he had sex with a man who broke his heart that he imagines even his friends protesting: “Are we to be spared nothing?”

Having spent 25 years sorting through the pretenses of writers who want to conceal the sources of their writing and the scheming that helped to build their careers, I find Mr. White’s candor – pursued even to the point of self-flagellation – astonishing. Want to know what it is like for a gay man growing old, getting fat, and yet still yearning for love? Mr. White describes the phenomenon without embarrassment. His much younger lover tells him at one point that Mr. White in his mid-60s retains the passion of youth, along with feelings that people Mr. White’s age no longer wish to suffer.

Henry James once said that we must grant the author his donne. In other words, the author should not be judged by his subject matter but by how he handles it. If Mr.White is graphic, he is also graceful:

I am a social sort who enjoys joking and having a good time. Lightness is a virtue in my scheme of things, rare and highly desirable. So many people are truly sad or bitter or incontestably in physical pain or in actual want. Women lose their looks and men their jobs – to stay in a cheerful mood after all that is the ultimate act of courage, even a fairly artificial one, given that groaning is a more natural response. In my pursuit of lightness, I sometimes feel like a spider monkey swinging through the trees in a world that is more and more deforested. If I look hard I can still find moments of frivolity, of silvery silliness, of merry complicity, even of pure cross-eyed joy. Till now, I usually can spot the next branch but sometimes it’s quite a stretch.

For all his heartbreaks and cock-ups, Mr. White has a pristine style – so pellucid, in fact, that it is difficult not to see it as a part of his soul.

Mr. White’s chapter on researching his biography of Jean Genet is just as revealing. He admits that at first he had trouble with interviews and was much too trusting of what he was told. It took seven years to master his subject’s language, in the course of which Mr. White sometimes used a concealed tape recorder, believing that it was more important to capture accurately what was said than to respect his sources’ objections to his stealthy behavior when he was caught out.

The autobiographer-biographer does not write to pardon himself or others. Mr. White describes in vivid detail the haunts of his youth in Texas, Michigan, and Ohio in the 1950s, where he formed his desire to write even as his stogie-smoking father worried about his sissy son, and his divorced and obese mother leaned on him for emotional support while making him cinch up her girdle; the grind of supporting himself in the 1960s and 1970s as a writer in New York City, brown-nosing with the likes of Susan Sontag, whom he then had to take down in a novel as a way of declaring his independence; his subsequent 15 years in Paris, painfully learning a new language and realizing that the French were not as froggy as his fellow Americans kept insisting; his return to New York and teaching at Princeton, where he remains an incorrigible romantic, sharing his love troubles with faculty, friends, and students alike.

This is autobiography without affectation and confession without absolution. This is writing for the sake of the word, writing that is wrapped up in itself and yet the opposite of what is usually termed solipsistic. These are words that Mr. White turns on himself. That they are his own words is remarkable, for autobiography is very rarely an objectifying genre.

crollyson@nysun.com