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

Description

Later: My Life at the Edge of the World
by Paul Lisicky
Paperback | March 17, 2020

Later is a luminous, deeply felt memoir about community, queerness, and survival, set in Provincetown at the height of the AIDS crisis. When Paul Lisicky arrives there in the early 1990s, he is fleeing a childhood marked by family trauma and searching for a place where art, identity, and belonging might finally align.

Provincetown initially appears timeless and utopian, a coastal haven shaped by inclusion, creativity, and chosen family. Lisicky immerses himself in its rhythms, forging connections, exploring love, and discovering his own voice as a gay writer. Yet even as he finds grounding and freedom, the town is being radically reshaped by loss. AIDS permeates daily life, rewiring social bonds, redefining intimacy, and forcing a reckoning with impermanence and care.

With clarity and emotional precision, Lisicky captures the tension between becoming oneself and living under the constant shadow of mortality. He writes of illness and desire, tenderness and fear, and the fragile beauty of a community holding itself together through crisis. Provincetown emerges as both sanctuary and battleground, a place where staying alive requires vigilance, presence, and extraordinary acts of love.

Following his acclaimed memoir The Narrow Door, Lisicky expands his exploration of memory, embodiment, and queer life with grace and formal ingenuity. Later is a haunting, compassionate meditation on what it means to belong to a place, a moment, and a people when the future is uncertain and the present demands everything.

This title is a remainder, offered at half the original cover price. Remainder copies are new and unread, but may show minor shelf wear.