Tom

A friend whose unreturned attraction teaches the narrator how sharply friendship and hidden desire can diverge.

What they want in White’s narrator’s account

To maintain an ordinary friendship rather than the romance projected onto him.

The book

A Boy's Own StoryEdmund White, 1982

A boy learns shame early and tries every available way to turn himself into someone else.

Spoiler-free

Tom is a friend and the object of an important unrequited crush. The narrator invests ordinary gestures with meanings Tom does not share.

Appearance, manner, and tone — as the book sketches them, in our words.

ApproachableHe is remembered as attractive without being theatrically glamorous.
OrdinaryHis normality makes the narrator’s disproportionate attention more revealing.
UnawareHe does not reciprocate the narrator’s romantic investment.
IdealizedMemory enlarges small gestures because the narrator cannot speak openly.

Four books that share themes, tone, or setting with this one.

Explore authors with a similar voice, perspective, and influence.

Charles Bukowski
American poet and novelist of Los Angeles rooming houses, racetracks and the post office, who quit his job to write when a publisher offered him a hundred dollars a month. He came to Paris once, in September 1978, drank his way through a live television book programme and walked off the set — and French television has been replaying it ever since.
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Louis-Ferdinand Céline
The doctor of the Paris slums who wrote the century's blackest, funniest novel — and changed the sound of French prose.
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Simone de Beauvoir
French writer and philosopher whose novels, memoirs, and social analysis examined freedom, gender, responsibility, aging, and the material conditions that shape a life.
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