A PREVIOUS LIFE

A septuagenarian musician and his 30-year-old wife break their silence about the past and share a series of episodic confessions.

White’s latest begins in the year 2050, when Sicilian musician Ruggero Castelnuovo and his American wife, Constance, decide to break a vow they had made to keep their pasts in the dark. Ruggero has already had a slew of marriages and love affairs with men and women alike, while Constance has had two brief marriages. When the couple determines that silence is no longer serving them, they begin to write a series of “confessions” in the form of episodic memoirs, which they take turns reading aloud. Ruggero shares memories of his aristocratic upbringing, his early sexual experiences, and the beginnings of his music career. Along with these reminiscences spill Ruggero’s anxieties about his reputation, which has been compromised by a dramatic and well-publicized affair with the writer Edmund White. Constance, on the other hand, details her parents’ tragic deaths and her subsequent upbringing by her nanny’s family. When she is continuously molested by an uncle figure, she becomes determined to pursue an education at an elite university and never return. For Ruggero, this foundational trauma explains her attraction to significantly older men, including one who robbed her of everything she had and another who humiliated her deeply. Traveling to various locations in Europe and the United States, the couple make life-altering decisions about their relationship as their memoirs address large questions about aging, death, and desire. In crisp but erotically charged prose, White provides a compelling character study that presses on the boundaries of sexuality and romance, polyamory and marriage. The memoirs give the book a unique and immersive structure as the secrets Ruggero and Constance reveal cast light on enigmatic parts of their internal lives and as they negotiate the terms of their marriage.

A delightful metafictional novel that examines conventions of marriage and love.