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Later: My Life at the Edge of the World
A stunning portrait of community, identity, and sexuality by the critically acclaimed author of The Narrow Door
When Paul Lisicky arrived in Provincetown in the early 1990s, he was leaving behind a history of family trauma to live in a place outside of time, known for its values of inclusion, acceptance, and art. In this idyllic haven, Lisicky searches for love and connection and comes into his own as he finds a sense of belonging. At the same time, the center of this community is consumed by the AIDS crisis, and the very structure of town life is being rewired out of What might this utopia look like during a time of dystopia?
Later dramatizes a spectacular yet ravaged place and a unique era when more fully becoming one’s self collided with the realization that ongoingness couldn’t be taken for granted, and staying alive from moment to moment exacted absolute attention. Following the success of his acclaimed memoir, The Narrow Door , Lisicky fearlessly explores the body, queerness, love, illness, community, and belonging in this masterful, ingenious new book.
When Paul Lisicky arrived in Provincetown in the early 1990s, he was leaving behind a history of family trauma to live in a place outside of time, known for its values of inclusion, acceptance, and art. In this idyllic haven, Lisicky searches for love and connection and comes into his own as he finds a sense of belonging. At the same time, the center of this community is consumed by the AIDS crisis, and the very structure of town life is being rewired out of What might this utopia look like during a time of dystopia?
Later dramatizes a spectacular yet ravaged place and a unique era when more fully becoming one’s self collided with the realization that ongoingness couldn’t be taken for granted, and staying alive from moment to moment exacted absolute attention. Following the success of his acclaimed memoir, The Narrow Door , Lisicky fearlessly explores the body, queerness, love, illness, community, and belonging in this masterful, ingenious new book.
240 pages, Paperback
First published March 17, 2020
81 people are currently reading
2110 people want to read
About the author
Paul Lisicky
24 books262 followersPAUL LISICKY is the author of The Narrow Door, Unbuilt Projects, The Burning House, Famous Builder, and Lawnboy. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, Conjunctions, Fence, The Iowa Review, The Offing, Ploughshares, Tin House, and many other anthologies and magazines. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he’s the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, the Henfield Foundation, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he was twice a fellow. He has taught in the writing programs at Cornell University, New York University, Rutgers University-Newark, and Sarah Lawrence College. He teaches in the MFA Program at Rutgers University-Camden. .
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 73 reviews
June 23, 2020
Every word of Paul Lisicky's "Later" will draw you in, begging you to picture it, to reflect on it, and to read it again and again.
Lisicky arrived in Provincetown, MA in 1991 during the heart of the AIDS crisis. A town on the cape, known for its queer community, was being ravaged by a disease - and a politics - that was killing the community of people calling it home. Entering into a tumultuous center, Lisicky finds his voice as a writer, falls in love, and considers the fears of being infected that lurk around every corner. Throughout his years in the "Town," he avoids ever being tested - desperately seeking freedom from the stigma and weight of the disease that is taking the lives of each of his friends. Though AIDS colors each page of this book, the story is so much more: a story of survival, of loss, of dodging the bullet with the one you love and despite that dodge still separating.
"Later" is a book that a reader hopes never ends. Sadly, it does. But lucky for you, you can read this tale again and again and again.
Lisicky arrived in Provincetown, MA in 1991 during the heart of the AIDS crisis. A town on the cape, known for its queer community, was being ravaged by a disease - and a politics - that was killing the community of people calling it home. Entering into a tumultuous center, Lisicky finds his voice as a writer, falls in love, and considers the fears of being infected that lurk around every corner. Throughout his years in the "Town," he avoids ever being tested - desperately seeking freedom from the stigma and weight of the disease that is taking the lives of each of his friends. Though AIDS colors each page of this book, the story is so much more: a story of survival, of loss, of dodging the bullet with the one you love and despite that dodge still separating.
"Later" is a book that a reader hopes never ends. Sadly, it does. But lucky for you, you can read this tale again and again and again.
August 21, 2022
I read Later in 2020, which was kind of a lost reading year for me (and definitely a lost reviewing year). I rated it four stars at the time, but two years later I’m still thinking about it. Paul Lisicky’s great strength, here and in his earlier memoir The Narrow Door, is pulling you in so you feel like you’re there—in this case, in 1990s Provincetown. Even thinking back on it, the feeling of physically being there is undeniable. So I’m upping my rating to five stars. When’s your next book coming out, Paul Lisicky?
March 14, 2020
My review for the Minneapolis Star Tribune:
http://www.startribune.com/review-lat...
A place of great remoteness and refuge, Provincetown — a coastal village at the tip of Cape Cod, Mass. — captivates the eyes and minds of its visitors and residents. In his memoir, “Later: My Life at the Edge of the World,” Paul Lisicky attests to its fascination by opening with not one but six epigraphs about the location from Henry David Thoreau, Mary Heaton Vorse, Denis Johnson, Eileen Myles, Andrea Lawlor and Annie Dillard, who writes: “What happens to people out here on the Lower Cape, a mid-ocean sandspit? From solid citizens they sublimed to limbless metaphysicians.”
A lyrical book of nonfiction both metaphysical and embodied, “Later” concerns itself contemplatively with the souls of humans and their mortal containers. Provincetown — or “Town” as he calls it to “keep it a mystery, take it back from all my old associations” — has long served as a haven for artists and members of the LGBTQ+ community. When Lisicky, in his early 30s, arrives in 1991 at the Fine Arts Work Center for a long-term residency for emerging artists, he is eager to immerse himself in Town’s creative and sexual opportunities.
“If you’re lucky in your life, a place, or two, will be offered to you. … It will be at some distance, and it will never be yours — you’ll always be a visitor or guest,” he writes, adding that “This place will give you things denied you in your place of growing up.”
There at the peninsular edge of New England, Lisicky finds the friends and romantic partners he had long been craving, thinking, “This is what power feels like, but only when power is spread evenly, or when queerness isn’t othered, but is central.” But his utopia, he acknowledges, is hardly without suffering. By the mid-1990s, “it will be said that 385 people died of AIDS in Town. Ten percent of the population.”
Lisicky writes lucidly with sorrow and joy of the complicated tension between transience and community in Provincetown at large and in the specifically queer milieu caught in the grip of the AIDS crisis, evoking the energy of people coming and going by choice and by fate, leaving sometimes for the mainland and sometimes for death.
Touching on youth and illness, inclusion and acceptance, Lisicky possesses an eye for geography and an ear for gallows humor, organizing the story in sections with such titles as “New Boy” and “Butch Butch Butch” and juxtaposing his thoughts with those of Lauren Berlant, Walt Odets and Michel Foucault.
Lisicky’s sinuous sentences and tone of composure attest to the unsentimental but inspiring idea that even “during the hour of a plague people from different backgrounds can be together. Not to dissolve that difference, but to love that difference.”
http://www.startribune.com/review-lat...
A place of great remoteness and refuge, Provincetown — a coastal village at the tip of Cape Cod, Mass. — captivates the eyes and minds of its visitors and residents. In his memoir, “Later: My Life at the Edge of the World,” Paul Lisicky attests to its fascination by opening with not one but six epigraphs about the location from Henry David Thoreau, Mary Heaton Vorse, Denis Johnson, Eileen Myles, Andrea Lawlor and Annie Dillard, who writes: “What happens to people out here on the Lower Cape, a mid-ocean sandspit? From solid citizens they sublimed to limbless metaphysicians.”
A lyrical book of nonfiction both metaphysical and embodied, “Later” concerns itself contemplatively with the souls of humans and their mortal containers. Provincetown — or “Town” as he calls it to “keep it a mystery, take it back from all my old associations” — has long served as a haven for artists and members of the LGBTQ+ community. When Lisicky, in his early 30s, arrives in 1991 at the Fine Arts Work Center for a long-term residency for emerging artists, he is eager to immerse himself in Town’s creative and sexual opportunities.
“If you’re lucky in your life, a place, or two, will be offered to you. … It will be at some distance, and it will never be yours — you’ll always be a visitor or guest,” he writes, adding that “This place will give you things denied you in your place of growing up.”
There at the peninsular edge of New England, Lisicky finds the friends and romantic partners he had long been craving, thinking, “This is what power feels like, but only when power is spread evenly, or when queerness isn’t othered, but is central.” But his utopia, he acknowledges, is hardly without suffering. By the mid-1990s, “it will be said that 385 people died of AIDS in Town. Ten percent of the population.”
Lisicky writes lucidly with sorrow and joy of the complicated tension between transience and community in Provincetown at large and in the specifically queer milieu caught in the grip of the AIDS crisis, evoking the energy of people coming and going by choice and by fate, leaving sometimes for the mainland and sometimes for death.
Touching on youth and illness, inclusion and acceptance, Lisicky possesses an eye for geography and an ear for gallows humor, organizing the story in sections with such titles as “New Boy” and “Butch Butch Butch” and juxtaposing his thoughts with those of Lauren Berlant, Walt Odets and Michel Foucault.
Lisicky’s sinuous sentences and tone of composure attest to the unsentimental but inspiring idea that even “during the hour of a plague people from different backgrounds can be together. Not to dissolve that difference, but to love that difference.”
March 22, 2020
Nominally this is a book about Provincetown in the early 90s, but I took it as a kind of rebirth amidst death and the potential for death amongst the gay community at that time. In its short segments, you slowly become enveloped in memories that add up to an artist’s self-actualization. It is also quite funny at parts too — this is not a Proustian narcotized reverie. At times it almost becomes prose poetry, and I didn’t always have the grounding I wanted from the narrative, but I felt quite moved and transported to a very different and yet familiar place.
August 14, 2023
Best queer memoir I've read.
June 9, 2020
*Later*, Paul Lisicky’s latest memoir about [Province]Town in the early 1990s, reads like a photo album set to language. Each chapter is broken into fragmented reminiscences, each slowly brought into relief, paragraph by paragraph, like a polaroid in the dark.
Lisicky’s companionable and poetic voice was one I easily identified with, a mix of the observer with the longing for connection to a world, particularly other queer men, around him. His hunger for intimacy gave the book its pulse and rhythm and meaning, so packed that I read slowly, savoring it:
“Dogs know how to be loved, but they are rare like that. For humans it’s easier to turn one’s eyes to someone else than it is to bear another’s eyes on you. Those eyes come with expectation, wanting. Those eyes say, You might leave, so I will grasp on to you and do everything I can to make you feel.”
Few texts I’ve read dare such an honest look into not just the everyday wanting that underlines a lot of queer sexualities but also queer sex, especially at a time when the AIDS epidemic cast dark shadows on desire and intimacy, when death made itself “sex’s twin.” I place Lisicky’s memoir alongside Garth Greenwell’s *Cleanness*, as queer texts that pull back the veil on private anxieties that may be troubling queer readers and aim to create wild possibilities of hope.
Lisicky’s companionable and poetic voice was one I easily identified with, a mix of the observer with the longing for connection to a world, particularly other queer men, around him. His hunger for intimacy gave the book its pulse and rhythm and meaning, so packed that I read slowly, savoring it:
“Dogs know how to be loved, but they are rare like that. For humans it’s easier to turn one’s eyes to someone else than it is to bear another’s eyes on you. Those eyes come with expectation, wanting. Those eyes say, You might leave, so I will grasp on to you and do everything I can to make you feel.”
Few texts I’ve read dare such an honest look into not just the everyday wanting that underlines a lot of queer sexualities but also queer sex, especially at a time when the AIDS epidemic cast dark shadows on desire and intimacy, when death made itself “sex’s twin.” I place Lisicky’s memoir alongside Garth Greenwell’s *Cleanness*, as queer texts that pull back the veil on private anxieties that may be troubling queer readers and aim to create wild possibilities of hope.
May 5, 2020
Beautiful, heart-aching memoir. Every sentence, every word, is magic.
January 2, 2020
With Later, Paul Lisicky offers an insightful and incisive account of his time in Provincetown in the early 1990s: first arriving as a young writer on a fellowship with the Fine Arts Work Center seeking the time and space to write while also searching for a sense of belonging, and love, as a gay man. Later pivots seamlessly between elegiac and nostalgic remembrance, at once an ode for a precise time and place as well as a clear-eyed archival of the idiosyncrasies and contradictions that constituted Provincetown during the AIDS crisis. As Lisicky charts the progression of his writing life, he shows that it is inseparable from the lives of friends he would make in Provincetown, the lives of the men he loved, and the lives of those he had to leave behind. Later is a collection of notes on a writer’s journey and a life lived as much as it is an astute and sensitive memoir.
July 7, 2021
Paul Lisicky’s AIDS memoir chronicles his time in Provincetown’s writing fellowship during the early 90’s at the height of the AIDS crisis. Lisicky’s my age exactly and he recalls the details we all faced in our lives living with death and sickness at such a young age and with most of society indifferent or feeling we deserved the plague. His story is simultaneously personal and universal and particularly important as we begin to recover from COVID. A real treat and an important historical document through one man’s eyes.
February 9, 2021
This lyrical meditation felt timely, considering it's a book about finding refuge in a plague, and was released (and read) while the world goes through one. Obviously the public, medical, and government response was completely underwhelming if not outright malicious for the AIDs crisis in comparison to our situation now. Later
April 23, 2020
I enjoyed the majority of the book.
Anytime that Lisicky discusses the lives of gay men and gay culture? I'm on board (hence the whole "I enjoyed the majority of the book" statement)
However, Lisicky fell into a trap that I don't like, which is when a writer talks about the self-righteous importance of writing.
Anytime that Lisicky discusses the lives of gay men and gay culture? I'm on board (hence the whole "I enjoyed the majority of the book" statement)
However, Lisicky fell into a trap that I don't like, which is when a writer talks about the self-righteous importance of writing.
July 26, 2020
In his memoir, "Later: My Life At the Edge of the World," Paul Lisicky brings us to Provincetown, which he refers to as the Town, in the 90s. A gay man leaving home, again, to start a seven month Fellowship at the prestigious Fine Arts Work Center Stanley Kunitz founded. He is approved for a second Fellowship and the Town becomes his home base. The style of the book is in prosaic sections that are titled and quilted together to form a tapestry.
He captures his mother's isolated world and her emotional state. At the beginning of the book, where he writes about leaving for the Fellowship. He is a stand-in for her emotional support, a heavy weight he experiences, his father lives separately with visits to the mother in the house she wanted. He starts the book with a piece titled Dream House where we learn his mother lost her father to suicide as a teenager, and the correlation that, "She's been on another kind of suicide...."
This is not set up to be linear, it covers time through the emotional ride of time. We are inside his mind in his thoughts about AIDS, about friends, about the people in Town, about his relationships, a mind that explores many possibilities and holds mixed emotions. In a section titled, My Lie, he writes, "And I can't get my mind off my lie. It is the one and only time I lie, and though I excuse myself be saying that people of good character do bad things at times of extremity, I don't like to meet this part of myself, as maybe this part of myself is unstoppable: a creek run over the banks, flooding neighborhoods. Why would it be so much harder to say, I don't know? I'm afraid. I want to live a life that isn't focused on my health, on prolonging my life, or on avoiding my death. I want to have as much freedom, and opportunities for trying and failing, as you do. I want to have the privilege of being bored. I don't want to endure the smells of a doctor's office, or the repeated sticks of a syringe. I don't want to get used to the sight of my blood, or a tongue depressor. I don't want to wait by the phone for my latest lab results, shuddering when they're not what I want to hear. I don't even want the adrenaline of good news, because that's always followed by a physical letdown: fatigue, depression. I don't want to lie awake at night, thinking of my doctor's face, whether I'm still handsome enough for him to feel attracted to me, as absurd as that sounds." He lied and said he was negative, but at that point he had not had the test. We are awash in a young man growing into manhood.
In a section titled, Speculative, he describes a time that feels like today's Covid-19 experience we are living in: "Yes, queer people and straight people will live side by side here, but there is no Provincetown when there isn't life in the yards and streets. In the pretend Provincetown, the citizens will stroll inside, pretend they hear a pot boiling over on the stove if they see someone walking down the sidewalk. They'll do anything, short of blinding themselves, rather than risk awkwardness, uncertainty. A spontaneous conversation? Backs will tense, not because these people are inherently cold, just that they know that human personality is disruptive and threatens the order they value more than they know. There will be a park, but it will be scraped clean with ballfields, more per square foot than any other place in the world—activity must replace spontaneity. There will be no halls of interaction, no bars, no coffeehouses, just churches. Instead there will be a farmer's market on Sunday to which people come after church to say hello and laugh, still under the spell of services or masses, and all their appeals to togetherness, which is where the divine lives." This section ends with the sentence (standing in its own paragraph), "I don't want to be superior to anyone for being afraid. We already have a culture built on that."
Through this book are threads of trauma, for this is the generation of AIDS and its many resulting deaths. The Town is one of the gay meccas. In the last section, Aftermath, Notes, where Paul is now a teacher, one of his grad students tells him "about a friend of hers who has an expression for any book written about AIDS: trauma porn." It is now 2018 and we are far from the Town, but the Town is still very much with those of us who lived through that era. This last section reveals the new world of PrEP. Paul goes to get a prescription and is still nervous to wait, once again, for his test result before he can start the med. And there is still stigma, outward and inward.
I loved reading this book, and I loved his memoir The Narrow Door. They are book books filled with insight and reflection that takes place in the process of learning about self and the world and how they intersect.
He captures his mother's isolated world and her emotional state. At the beginning of the book, where he writes about leaving for the Fellowship. He is a stand-in for her emotional support, a heavy weight he experiences, his father lives separately with visits to the mother in the house she wanted. He starts the book with a piece titled Dream House where we learn his mother lost her father to suicide as a teenager, and the correlation that, "She's been on another kind of suicide...."
This is not set up to be linear, it covers time through the emotional ride of time. We are inside his mind in his thoughts about AIDS, about friends, about the people in Town, about his relationships, a mind that explores many possibilities and holds mixed emotions. In a section titled, My Lie, he writes, "And I can't get my mind off my lie. It is the one and only time I lie, and though I excuse myself be saying that people of good character do bad things at times of extremity, I don't like to meet this part of myself, as maybe this part of myself is unstoppable: a creek run over the banks, flooding neighborhoods. Why would it be so much harder to say, I don't know? I'm afraid. I want to live a life that isn't focused on my health, on prolonging my life, or on avoiding my death. I want to have as much freedom, and opportunities for trying and failing, as you do. I want to have the privilege of being bored. I don't want to endure the smells of a doctor's office, or the repeated sticks of a syringe. I don't want to get used to the sight of my blood, or a tongue depressor. I don't want to wait by the phone for my latest lab results, shuddering when they're not what I want to hear. I don't even want the adrenaline of good news, because that's always followed by a physical letdown: fatigue, depression. I don't want to lie awake at night, thinking of my doctor's face, whether I'm still handsome enough for him to feel attracted to me, as absurd as that sounds." He lied and said he was negative, but at that point he had not had the test. We are awash in a young man growing into manhood.
In a section titled, Speculative, he describes a time that feels like today's Covid-19 experience we are living in: "Yes, queer people and straight people will live side by side here, but there is no Provincetown when there isn't life in the yards and streets. In the pretend Provincetown, the citizens will stroll inside, pretend they hear a pot boiling over on the stove if they see someone walking down the sidewalk. They'll do anything, short of blinding themselves, rather than risk awkwardness, uncertainty. A spontaneous conversation? Backs will tense, not because these people are inherently cold, just that they know that human personality is disruptive and threatens the order they value more than they know. There will be a park, but it will be scraped clean with ballfields, more per square foot than any other place in the world—activity must replace spontaneity. There will be no halls of interaction, no bars, no coffeehouses, just churches. Instead there will be a farmer's market on Sunday to which people come after church to say hello and laugh, still under the spell of services or masses, and all their appeals to togetherness, which is where the divine lives." This section ends with the sentence (standing in its own paragraph), "I don't want to be superior to anyone for being afraid. We already have a culture built on that."
Through this book are threads of trauma, for this is the generation of AIDS and its many resulting deaths. The Town is one of the gay meccas. In the last section, Aftermath, Notes, where Paul is now a teacher, one of his grad students tells him "about a friend of hers who has an expression for any book written about AIDS: trauma porn." It is now 2018 and we are far from the Town, but the Town is still very much with those of us who lived through that era. This last section reveals the new world of PrEP. Paul goes to get a prescription and is still nervous to wait, once again, for his test result before he can start the med. And there is still stigma, outward and inward.
I loved reading this book, and I loved his memoir The Narrow Door. They are book books filled with insight and reflection that takes place in the process of learning about self and the world and how they intersect.
September 15, 2021
It's the emotional intelligence that made this book a page-turner for me. Complex, sometimes ugly, queer feelings, some of which I suspect have never before been so finely rendered, about arriving on the scene of early-90s HIV/AIDS, homophobia, and Provincetown utopia. It inevitably makes me think about the present and what shapes us now.
April 24, 2020
cracked my heart all the way open
March 23, 2020
Bracingly honest, gorgeous, tragic, and at times funny: a man finding his inner self, living in a place he loves in a time of love, life and death. I finished it breathless. 5 stars. #books #books2020 #bookstagram #reading #readersofnstagram
October 25, 2023
A beautiful, poetic, and very often moving story about living in Provincetown during the height of the AIDS crisis. This put a personal side to a time when people were often reduced to numbers (numbers of people who died due to complications related to AIDS, numbers of people infected with HIV). A really poignant view of found family and complex relationships, too.
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December 31, 2020I am not going to rate this book just because I didn't connect with it. It's a beautifully written book of memory, but I felt as if I were kept at arm's length -- as is the author was coldly observing himself. My feelings may have more to do with me than the book.
March 24, 2020
A powerful memoir that reads like a series of prose poems stitched together into a gorgeous quilt. Lisicky's book does an incredible job of evoking a complex and harrowing era of life in Provincetown in the early 1990s. The book's rave reviews are all well deserved. Poets and Writers sums it up very well in the following description: "At once intimate and expansive, Later is a vital exploration of queer life past, present, and future."
The writing is gorgeous throughout. Here is just one of many sections I transcribed in my journal of favorite passages: "In my mind every death will always be an AIDS death; everyone will always die before their time, whether they're twenty-one or ninety-one. Nobody will ever get enough affection . . . the dead burn brighter to me than they do when they're alive."
The writing is gorgeous throughout. Here is just one of many sections I transcribed in my journal of favorite passages: "In my mind every death will always be an AIDS death; everyone will always die before their time, whether they're twenty-one or ninety-one. Nobody will ever get enough affection . . . the dead burn brighter to me than they do when they're alive."
July 29, 2020
This was a birthday gift, so I really wanted to like it. I made myself finish the book, hoping somehow that I'd like it in the end. Some of the writing is powerful, and I appreciate it as a historical document, but that's all. Guess you can't connect with everyone, and I'm just not connecting with this author.
September 21, 2020
Read this in March, not sure why I never logged it but I guess it was March and I was little distracted by the plague...
June 17, 2020
Why don't I get these books? There There, The Disappearing Earth, Overstory, Later - the constant switching makes it hard to follow. At least with TT and TDE I could connect to the characters.
I lived the story of Later with my friends and loved ones in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. I wanted to love this book - Paula is me. But I just kept getting caught up and moving away. Bummed and dissapointed.
I lived the story of Later with my friends and loved ones in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. I wanted to love this book - Paula is me. But I just kept getting caught up and moving away. Bummed and dissapointed.
January 19, 2021
Although this is better written than Lisicky's previous memoir stylistically, it's not artistic enough or interesting enough to move me emotionally.
I liked it at the beginning. But the book never led anywhere and it gets tiring in the middle. Everyone is depicted as being miserable, depressing, and neurotic. There's one memorable description of a leather man in heels, not having fun or enjoying his outre outfit, just being angry at a hypothetical "puritan" who disapproves of him. There has to be an element of life, joy, and humor that this book is ignoring. I can't believe the man being described here would agree with Lisicky's excruciatingly dour vision of himself.
I liked Lisicky's examination of his relationship with his parents. That must have been painful to write, I admire Lisicky for doing so.
Blurbs on my copy say this book is sexy. I'm asexual, not an expert on sexiness by any means, but I can't imagine how anyone could find these sex scenes anything but revolting. He over-analyzes everything and takes all the fun out of it. If you're going to have a lot of nsa sex, just do it. If it's going to make you so miserable then don't.
There's an adolescent perspective to this book that brings it down. He's always rebelling against others, never living for himself, and the writer doesn't extract anything profound from that urge to define himself through the lens of external authority figures. His writing instead seems to be blinkered by it.
None of the thoughts or conclusions about life in here are original. His jabs against organized religion and capitalism particularly reek of an outdated, 1970s countercultural aesthetic that writers have been parroting for decades. There's nothing wrong with being secular or anti-capitalist, but be coherent and intelligent about it.
I think other people would get a lot more from this book. If you're grumpy and sad, a lot of this book might resonate with you. As a young gay man I deliberately try to disassociate myself from the frivolous, frankly selfish culture celebrated here. This is a time capsule that captures one person's historical feelings that are important to recognize, but it thankfully does not reflect the future.
I liked it at the beginning. But the book never led anywhere and it gets tiring in the middle. Everyone is depicted as being miserable, depressing, and neurotic. There's one memorable description of a leather man in heels, not having fun or enjoying his outre outfit, just being angry at a hypothetical "puritan" who disapproves of him. There has to be an element of life, joy, and humor that this book is ignoring. I can't believe the man being described here would agree with Lisicky's excruciatingly dour vision of himself.
I liked Lisicky's examination of his relationship with his parents. That must have been painful to write, I admire Lisicky for doing so.
Blurbs on my copy say this book is sexy. I'm asexual, not an expert on sexiness by any means, but I can't imagine how anyone could find these sex scenes anything but revolting. He over-analyzes everything and takes all the fun out of it. If you're going to have a lot of nsa sex, just do it. If it's going to make you so miserable then don't.
There's an adolescent perspective to this book that brings it down. He's always rebelling against others, never living for himself, and the writer doesn't extract anything profound from that urge to define himself through the lens of external authority figures. His writing instead seems to be blinkered by it.
None of the thoughts or conclusions about life in here are original. His jabs against organized religion and capitalism particularly reek of an outdated, 1970s countercultural aesthetic that writers have been parroting for decades. There's nothing wrong with being secular or anti-capitalist, but be coherent and intelligent about it.
I think other people would get a lot more from this book. If you're grumpy and sad, a lot of this book might resonate with you. As a young gay man I deliberately try to disassociate myself from the frivolous, frankly selfish culture celebrated here. This is a time capsule that captures one person's historical feelings that are important to recognize, but it thankfully does not reflect the future.
February 20, 2020
Stunning book! So many sentences were highlighted. Poets are truly the best writer.s. Highly recommend.
November 22, 2021
Although it took me quite awhile to "get into" this book because of the fractured element of the narrative structure, it contains beautiful ruminations on coming of age as a queer man in the 90s, sexuality, self, craft (becoming a writer) and place (Provincetown).
April 4, 2020
A beautifully written, literary memoir about Lisicky's early years in Provincetown from 1991-1994. I was immediately captivated by the opening scene, in which he is saying goodbye to his mother, and on the brink of a new life. He realizes, "She is afraid of my living among my kind, especially now that so many young men are dying of AIDS. She is expecting me to die of AIDS."
AIDS is the character all other characters maneuver around, containing as it does the fullness of both sex and death within itself. Liskicky describes the times and the social scene in a way that is both lyrical and psychologically astute. He ends with a chapter dated 2018, "Afterlife," when Lisicky commits to daily PrEP to protect himself from HIV/AIDS. This decision is a repudiation of all the fear and damage of the past, but the tragedy of the disease still resonates, still spreads itself through young gay men in the interior of the nation and elsewhere.
I am awed by the depth and beauty of Lisicky's ruminations about culture, identity, and sexuality and am glad that I purchased this book.
AIDS is the character all other characters maneuver around, containing as it does the fullness of both sex and death within itself. Liskicky describes the times and the social scene in a way that is both lyrical and psychologically astute. He ends with a chapter dated 2018, "Afterlife," when Lisicky commits to daily PrEP to protect himself from HIV/AIDS. This decision is a repudiation of all the fear and damage of the past, but the tragedy of the disease still resonates, still spreads itself through young gay men in the interior of the nation and elsewhere.
I am awed by the depth and beauty of Lisicky's ruminations about culture, identity, and sexuality and am glad that I purchased this book.
May 16, 2020
I finished it, circled back and started reading it again. I got partway through and realized I’d been devouring it at a breakneck speed.
The chapters are broken into smaller collections of paragraphs, snippets that at times read like diary entries.
A document of Provincetown from 1991-94, it describes life in all its complexity amid the AIDS epidemic and, now amid a worldwide COVID-19 quarantine, is surprisingly relevant and timely.
The chapters are broken into smaller collections of paragraphs, snippets that at times read like diary entries.
A document of Provincetown from 1991-94, it describes life in all its complexity amid the AIDS epidemic and, now amid a worldwide COVID-19 quarantine, is surprisingly relevant and timely.
February 15, 2020
This has a good voice. It’s well done, though I like the sentence/paragraph level best. I get lost a little on the larger scope from that and have to make myself focus again, but that’s probably just me.
April 28, 2020
Paul Lisicky arrived in Provincetown, MA in 1991 as a fellow in the Fine Arts Work Center during the height of the AIDS crisis. Part coming of age story, identity story, and meditation on the meaning of life during a time filled with so much death, it seemed an appropriate book for these pandemic days. Lisicky writes taunt, yet lyric, prose, baring the essence of this time and place with a sharp lens. One of the particularly masterful aspects of this memoir is how Town is more than a setting, it is, in fact, a character, as living and breathing as those who inhabit that spit of sand at land's end.
August 25, 2023
After reading the sentences about anger and Paul’s relationship with his father, I knew I was in the hands of a master. “He wanted his skin to rub off into us so we would not forget the cost of everything he did to give us the life we had. The martyring. And if that isn’t anger in the purest, most frozen form, then I can’t read the world.”
This memoir revolving around Provincetown in the early nineties is full of choice writing. With our current Corona Virus, it’s hauntingly refreshing to remembers the AIDS crisis and the impact on relationships through the lens of Paul Lisicky.
This memoir revolving around Provincetown in the early nineties is full of choice writing. With our current Corona Virus, it’s hauntingly refreshing to remembers the AIDS crisis and the impact on relationships through the lens of Paul Lisicky.
October 17, 2021
A memoir of life in Provincetown in the early 1990s, at the height of the AIDS epidemic. Told in fragments and vignettes about sex, relationships, friendship; about fear of AIDS, and about the rebellion (of a person, a community) to keep going despite that fear. The vignettes are a mix of the profound and the mundane - the ability to keep going during a time of horror and sadness, alongside the minutiae of everyday life - Lisicky's writing fellowship, arguments with lovers. Lisicky's prose is beautiful and poetic, philosophical. It is thoughtful and searching.
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