In his work Edmund White has explored sex and the human body and the city and its sensations and primarily the mercurial evanescence of life and the connection between dying and creativity. Barber documents White's life from his early childhood (recreated in "A Boy's Own Story") through his twenties, both in 1962 arriving in New York from the Mid-West which was like going from the 19th to the 20th centuries and in 1969 he participated in the Stonewall riots against homophobic persecution, his life in New York in the seventies and his travelling around North America in the late 1970s to research and write "States of Desire", his eye-witness account of the gay male community in a moment of explosive development. In 1983 White moved from New York to Paris with his love John Purcell and a whole new life opened up for him. It was here he met many famous people from Michael Foucault and Herve Guibert through Bruce Chatwin. Edmund White's life acts as a magnificent companion to his novels and sheds light on them.