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

Since my post of 4/5/20, about having very recently (since being in the pandemic stay-at-home era) read six books about women writers, I have now read more books about writers. The first one (I will write about others later) is a memoir by a gay male writer, “Later: My Life at the Edge of the World” (Graywolf, 2020), by Paul Lisicky, tells of the time period during which the author took up a writing fellowship in a program in Provincetown, on the East Coast, a somewhat isolated, charming small city famed for its artists and for its gay life. Lisicky had had a difficult time dealing with homophobia, overt and subtle, in his family and in most parts of his life. Thus Provincetown was for him a sort of magic city, where being gay was the norm, not an aberration, and where he was surrounded by writers, “kindred spirits.” In many ways this was a joyful time for the author, during which he felt free to openly be his real self. But this was in the early days of the AIDS crisis, and he, like every gay man, was both afraid for himself and mourning his friends and others who fell ill and -- in those times before there was life-prolonging medication -- died. He tells of his relationships with lovers, friends, fellow writers (some people were in two or even three of these categories), and with Provincetown itself. “Later” is a bittersweet memoir, one of great interest both for the parts about writing and the parts about the terrible epidemic of HIV/AIDS. And of course, these past few weeks, we readers -- especially those of us old enough to have been around during the beginnings of the appearance of AIDS -- have increasingly seen parallels between that crisis and the current one.