Reviews

Later: My Life at the Edge of the World by Paul Lisicky

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readrunsea's review against another edition

5.0

This memoir mostly takes place in early 1990s Provincetown, or Town, as Lisicky renders it - a loving nickname for a complicated place. At the height of the AIDS crisis, Town embodies both freedom from homophobia in the ‘outside’ world and a potent concentration of people suffering from the epidemic. Hence, utopia/dystopia at once. A lot of comparisons have been made between the AIDS epidemic and the current pandemic, most of which aren’t really useful imo, but there are undeniable parallels despite major differences that make a story like this feel prescient.

This book is told mainly in vignettes, with rhythmic prose that feels hypnotic, full of gestures and movements. Themes of futurity, fear, joy, grief, and coming of age in a different way than one does in adolescence are its beautiful skeleton.

wwbutler's review against another edition

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5.0

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.

booksellingandbagels's review against another edition

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5.0

“I want to touch you while there’s still time to touch you.”

amberinbookland's review against another edition

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emotional reflective sad medium-paced

3.0

john_ingold's review against another edition

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3.0

“If I were studying my mother in a story, if I could step back from all my hot feelings, I could admit she still saw all the parts of me I’ve obliterated”
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“The theater goes dark. I’m watching characters move across the street, but thinking more about Noah holding my hand, rotating the knuckle of my thumb with his own. Is there anything more satisfying than having your significant other holding your hand out in public, at a movie? Straight people take this for granted, but queer people? We can hardly wait for the lights to go down, and once the movie gets going, the real happiness begins: Noah’s hand in mine”

oliverclarke's review against another edition

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Have no idea where I picked this book up from but what a hidden gem. Lisicky manages to pull of a memoir that is both very well written and lacking in self indulgence, a rare feat! Written about his time living as a writer in Provincetown, Massachusetts during the early 90s, the height of the AIDS crisis in the US. Lisicky provides an honest an thought-provoking story about finding himself and a community in a time when said community was being decimated by stigma and illness. Definitely glad I gave it a read.