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Later: My Life at the Edge of the World

Paul Lisicky (Goodreads Author)

4.14 · Rating details · 298 ratings · 49 reviews

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 connecti ...more

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Paperback, 240 pages

Published March 17th 2020 by Graywolf Press

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· 298 ratings · 49 reviews

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Jul 10, 2020 Michael rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2020, recs

so very mesmerizing and devastating. in swift prose Lisicky recollects the time he and his literary friends spent in Provincetown in the early ‘90s, across a series of diaristic fragments recording his daily activities, the best of which border on prose poetry. he takes on a lot here—his alienation from his family + his longing for queer community in the midst of an epidemic, the rise and fall of his relationship with a dancer, the character of Provincetown’s social life, the trauma of watching ...more

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Apr 01, 2020 Erik rated it it was amazing

Shelves: lgbt

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 ...more

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Dec 28, 2019 Kathleen rated it really liked it

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 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.” ...more

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Mar 22, 2020 G rated it it was amazing

Shelves: high-caliber

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 move ...more

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Jun 09, 2020 BookChampions rated it it was amazing

Shelves: nonfic, memoir

*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 rhyth ...more

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May 05, 2020 Kevin Catalano rated it it was amazing

Beautiful, heart-aching memoir. Every sentence, every word, is magic.

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Nov 03, 2019 Billy rated it it was amazing

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 constitu ...more

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Apr 20, 2020 Crystal rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2020, lgbtqia, non-fiction, pub-2020, memoir, death-grief, zformat-ebook, zp-2020-e

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 ...more

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Jul 23, 2020 Julene rated it it was amazing

Shelves: memoir, hiv-aids

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 emot 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. ...more

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Apr 23, 2020 Shea rated it it was amazing

cracked my heart all the way open

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Jun 12, 2020 Eli rated it it was amazing

“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; everyone will be abandoned emotionally by the people they’d counted on, who get hardened by procedures, the insurance industry, the medical establishment, the funeral industry at the end. And for all that’s against their terrible journey, the dead burn brighter to me than they do when they’re alive.”

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May 05, 2020 Gordon Prescott rated it really liked it

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 remembe ...more

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Mar 22, 2020 John Sinclair rated it it was amazing

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

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Apr 22, 2020 Jody rated it really liked it

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. ...more

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Apr 10, 2020 Ray Shea rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2020

Reading a book about surviving a plague in one of my favorite places while being locked down during a plague in one of my other favorite places. This book is really fucking beautiful.

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Dec 31, 2020 Bill added it · review of another edition

I 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. ...more

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Mar 23, 2020 Matthew rated it it was amazing

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 ...more

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Jul 28, 2020 David rated it liked it

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.
...more

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Mar 27, 2020 Anna (Bailed to go to Storygraph! Username: acweber) rated it it was amazing

This is one of the best memoirs I've ever read ...more

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Sep 21, 2020 Matthew Lawrence rated it it was amazing

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...

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Jun 16, 2020 Mary rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-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. ...more

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Feb 20, 2020 Sarah rated it it was amazing

Stunning book! So many sentences were highlighted. Poets are truly the best writer.s. Highly recommend.

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Apr 04, 2020 Peggy rated it really liked it

Shelves: memoir, lgbt-themed, disease-medical-conditions

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 ...more

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May 15, 2020 Joseph rated it really liked it

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.

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Feb 15, 2020 David rated it really liked it

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.

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Apr 28, 2020 Christine Corrigan rated it really liked it

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 ...more

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Apr 03, 2020 Joanne Kelly rated it really liked it

Paul Lisicky takes us on quite a journey through the world of queer life in Provincetown in the time of AIDS. He writes with deep emotion, deep honesty and a poetic sensibility as he explores his own lusty sexuality and need for belonging. The fragmentary nature of his writing made it difficult for me to really engage with this story as well as I would have liked.

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Mar 17, 2020 Martha Anne Toll added it

Here's my review for NPR Books https://www.npr.org/2020/03/17/813631...

And here https://themillions.com/2020/12/a-yea... ...more

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Apr 07, 2020 Jackie rated it really liked it

Shelves: generally-gay-not-strictly-straight, nonfiction-or-just-not-fiction

Such a moving meditation on a place and time. I’m grateful to have gone to Provincetown for the first time last summer, so it was easy to feel myself there again.

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Apr 12, 2020 Lance Richardson rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

An absolute knockout.

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About Paul Lisicky

Paul Lisicky

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PAUL 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 ...more