Later: My Life at the Edge of the World

This book affected me more than anything else I've read in a long time. Amazing writer.

Rather than weaving an evocative tapestry, the author rolls out a Frankensteinian quilt of disjointed and unevenly developed ruminations - each ponderously titled in bold and uselessly corralled in chapters - that prioritizes an annoyingly ungrounded and neurotic narration, inadvertently reducing time, place, and character to gratuities. The form may arguably match the content of living through that terrible era in a special corner of the planet, but the longer I stayed with the text, the more quickly I wanted to get off the peninsula.

Mostly a coming-of-age in the early AIDS years story, the author's descriptions of Town (how the townies refer to P'town/Provincetown) are so spot on - both the physical descriptions of the Cape and the gay men who live there. I've visited a number of times, so I can see the streets, the houses, the people, the weather so clearly when the author writes about them, it's almost as if salt spray and sea air waft from every page. This memoir should definitely join Michael Cunningham's Lands End as one of the best books about that very special place.

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.

What an engaging tale of life in Provincetown (or "Town") during the really tough years of the HIV epidemic. Here you can feel the pressure and grace in life that must be lived under such harrowing conditions...I read and reread and catch myself lingering over so many gorgeous observations, which sometimes come at the most challenging times...times that may well prove a parallel to the pandemic world we live in now. Here is beauty and if ever we have needed beauty, LATER is now. What a marvel, what a powerful sharing, what a blessing of “lyric time, which has nothing to do with the clock.”