‘In the 1970s in New York everyone slept till noon’

With this incantatory first sentence, Edmund White begins the memoir of his time as a gay man in New York in the sixties and seventies. It is a sentence that has so many levels of meaning, but one of these meanings evokes L P Hartley’s famous first sentence in his novel , ‘The Go-Between:’  ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ The New York Edmund White describes is not the sleek, financial behemoth of today, but a dark, dangerous, chaotic place, full of uncollected rubbish and muggers.

But it was also a vibrant place where people could live cheaply and where artistic and intellectual endeavour was what counted. It became a honeypot to the young, struggling writers, actors, painters who came from all over the US to live downtown in varying states of squalor. In this memoir, White describes his progression from a self-hating gay man in the mid sixties and struggling writer to out and proud published author in the early eighties and is particular good on the pivotal role of the Stonewall riots of June 1969.

This semi- autobiographical novel is a haunting bildungsroman about growing up gay in 1950s America.  It describes an adolescent’s realisation of his sexuality and his ‘impossible desire to love a man but not .. be a homosexual.’

It perfectly captures the sharp, shapeless yearning of late adolescence and what it was like to realise you were destined to love men when all around you screamed at you to love women.

This is an intriguing memoir, beautifully written by an author who has written numerous other non-fiction books. Jan Morris, formerly known as James Morris, was the correspondent for the London Times assigned to cover England's historic summit of Everest. The author actually accompanied the expedition to the Himalayas and did on site dispatches of the historic event.

Morris always felt that she should have been female. She led a sheltered childhood and knew almost nothing about sex. Her feeling of wanting to be female, she says is the very essence- her soul. She describes it as a yearning for unity.

Jeanette Winterson’s wonderful semi autobiographical novel is a bildungsroman about a gay girl growing up in an English Pentecostal community. Her family are extreme religious fundamentalists who perform an exorcism on the adolescent heroine and her lesbian lover.

John Mullan has called it a ‘Künstlerroman’, depicting an artist's growth to maturity in the teeth of disapproval, and against the grain of an older generation's beliefs. Classic examples are Dickens's David Copperfield, Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Lawrence's Sons and Lovers.