Edmund White’s Skinned Alive is a collection of essays and autobiographical fragments circling sex, illness, and memory, written in the long shadow of the AIDS crisis.

It moves between personal confession and cultural observation, tracking what it means to live in a body that is both desired and vulnerable. There isn’t a single narrative thread so much as a set of returns: to lovers, to losses, to moments. White writes about queerness with a kind of unguarded precision—cruising, intimacy, shame, ageing—the “skinning” here becoming literal and metaphorical through a stripping back of persona, until what’s left is uncomfortable, lucid, and difficult to ignore.

It reads like someone refusing to look away from their own life, even when it would be easier to aestheticise it.

Picador paperback, 1996 (first UK Picador edition; originally published 1995). Good condition: light shelf wear and minor creasing to edges; some toning to pages; binding solid; no major inscriptions noted.