Novelist Edmund White: My years as an American in Paris

Gay novelist Edmund White lived in the French capital in the 1980s, but in his new memoir he recounts that local customs were a shock to him, says Richard Fitzpatrick.

FEW can match Edmund White — who was praised by novelist Vladimir Nabokov — for precision and humour in writing.

White, an American, ponders the French in his latest book, Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris, which is a memoir of the years he lived by the Seine. He arrived in the summer of 1983 and stayed for 15 years.