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ajewell's review
4.5
I loved the form of this book and I loved it on a sentence level. I could feel palpably how much WORK writing this book must have taken. In some moments I found the narrator’s voice a little self involved but I always feel like that’s a pretty silly take to have about a memoir. In general I love Lisicky’s voice, it’s always surprising to me.
julenetrippweaver's review
5.0
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.
eliellis's review
5.0
“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.”
jphillips87's review
Found it hard to get into but I’ll probably come back and finish it later
whatsmacksaid's review
I started this a week ago and only made it to page 38. I just can't get into it, and it's due back to the library soon, so I'm giving up. It's not bad by any stretch of the imagination, but each entry requires meditation and reflection upon finishing it, and I just don't have the attention or energy for that right now. I like to think I'll return to this sometime in the future when I do, but it's iffy.
rayshea's review
5.0
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.