His analysis of...relationships is part revelatory for his keen powers of observation, part heartbreaking, and all human ... Lisicky is a gifted writer. With meticulous emotional nuance, he not only captures his day-to-day, but manages to translate lessons from the day-to-day into a manual for living ... gorgeous ... Later is beautifully composed and structured ... 'every death will always be an AIDS death; everyone will always die before their time, whether they're twenty-one or ninety-one.' And that perhaps, is Later's greatest lesson.
Later takes us on a heart-wrenching journey through Lisicky’s transition from living with his mother to his exploration and discovery of gay communities, and finally to his encounter with death and illness as a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. But, more specifically, Later asks us to consider the power of retrospection, a timely consideration given the global confinement regulation in the face of the current COVID-19 outbreak ... urgency can often be found lingering in the work of many gay writers publishing during or reflecting on the ’80s and ’90s. And Lisicky masterfully situates himself within this history ... Lisicky beautifully renders the readers complicit in this act of survivance. Readers see through the eyes of a visitor who becomes a local through his constant exposure to death and illness but also through the opening of his heart to the possibility of love and community in epidemiological time ... the memoir, the narrative ultimately arrives at a present that feels full, manageable, and free ... Lisicky invites his reader into this delicate, brutal, and moving psychoanalytical terrain, and for those of us cut off by birth and history from the peak of the AIDS crisis, this intergenerational invitation is irresistible. He seduces us, breaks our heart, and helps us put it back together—but not once does he allow the space for a post-memorial nostalgia.
The chapters are full of named sections, lists of what makes up his life in Provincetown: Haven, Movie, Pilgrim, Foglifter, Wally, Imposter Syndrome. This pointillistic style allows Lisicky to build his story impressionistically. There are no surprises in the general plot, per se: Lisicky becomes the published writer and openly gay man we’ve come to know. But the 'how' of it fascinates ... He especially captures the fear I’d almost forgotten—the intensity with which we as gay men so often feared one another ...This memoir is much like his Provincetown, exulting in tenderness and lust, lit with flashes of poignant spectacle, even the majestic—the way a drag queen at night can become, in sequins under a spotlight, full of the fire and beauty we associate with goddesses, before descending back to the realm of the human.
Lisicky writes in waves, as if to mirror the shore. Paragraphs that wash through you. Phrases that crash upon you. At first, it seems like bursts of prose with only a headline to collect thoughts and demarcate them into sections of each chapter. Only over time do you realize that you have been swept up. It’s a form of literary sprezzatura, one that is years in the making. It is a collection which keeps building upon itself; its heft is in the stories and small details it amasses. Because of this, it’s easy to get lost in this book. Knowing which long term relationship he was in (Hollis or Noah?), only helped to orient me so much. But I encourage letting yourself get lost, to letting feelings take over, on the first read. Then you can return to Town for the prose, both generous in detail and thoughtful in diction. Despite such a tight perimeter around Paul’s personal experience of Town, he avoids solipsism. Both Paul and the book are often asking where they situate in a larger picture ... To sum up the experience of reading Later with a metaphor, it would be like being held—vertically or horizontally, your choice. You feel the topography of someone, the smooth and coarse. You hear the thumping of their heart and you smell the scent of their body. You feel the comfort of their warmth and the pressure of their body against yours. It is the holding but also the eventual letting go.
Later is not a conventional memoir. The book consists of 34 numbered, untitled chapters ... It’s as if a diary has been turned inside out ... it’s his pared-down episodic structure that allows for a careful spontaneity suspending time ... he manages to speak of longing and loss and craving and stasis and flailing and sobbing and laughing and cracking, all amid a persistent search for beauty and connection.
Lisicky writes lucidly with sorrow and joy of the complicated tension between transience and community in Provincetown at large and in the specifically queer milieu caught in the grip of the AIDS crisis, evoking the energy of people coming and going by choice and by fate, leaving sometimes for the mainland and sometimes for death. Touching on youth and illness, inclusion and acceptance, Lisicky possesses an eye for geography and an ear for gallows humor ... Lisicky’s sinuous sentences and tone of composure attest to the unsentimental but inspiring idea that even 'during the hour of a plague people from different backgrounds can be together. Not to dissolve that difference, but to love that difference.'
Dense and layered, the book crests with the lyrical resonance while looking back at a young, queer life gripped in the talons of loss, on the rim of death ... In layered, poetic, self-aware prose, Lisicky reckons with the tensions between the freedom of community and its insularity; between dark desire and animalistic power; between sex and death. Lisicky explores the devastating, hard-to-look-at idea that death bonds the queer community through sex ... is not only a chronicle of the AIDS crisis, though its pages are inevitably permeated by that tragedy. Lisicky deftly weaves a story of a young gay man both jaded and alive, acutely observing the people and landscape around him, taking his freedom and power and questioning what these even are. Later moves in vignettes inextricably bound to one another, crescendoing at the end with a scene that is less cerebral but pumping with symbolism.
... emotionally raw ... The book’s structure is jarring, and its rhythm fragmented and deliberately incomplete. Nothing is buttoned up into a neat, conclusive narrative ... [Lisicky's] unfiltered voice is a primal scream throughout the book as Lisicky tries to navigate being an emotional and sexually active gay man looking for love and personal liberation in a catastrophic time ... sags in spots like a relentless diary of ennui and the author basically being pissed off at everything, obsessing on relationship drama and unresolved family matters. But ultimately it is a frank remembrance of things past, and almost despite its author’s efforts it becomes more than a self-lacerating confessional.
...a deeply meditative and deceptively meandering series of vignettes, asides, observations, and questions both rhetorical and otherwise that cohere to reveal a writer grappling with the costs of desire ... In Later, Lisicky gives individual faces to the victims we often speak about collectively, and what might seem at times on the verge of becoming a catalogue of relationships, some dizzyingly fleeting and others more enduring, becomes instead an intimate glimpse into daily life during an epidemic ... timeless.
This was the time of the AIDS epidemic, and the author cites a series of statistics that are still shocking nearly three decades later ... Written in short, titled sections, the memoir is brutally honest as Lisicky chronicles his search for companionship and love amid sadness, illness, and death ... Some readers may wish for more about literature and writing, but that is not the author’s focus here. Lisicky does a fine job capturing the emotional ambience of a special place consumed by both joy and fear. A candid, scorching memoir that emits tenderness and sweet sorrow.
A writer recalls his search for love and community in Provincetown, Mass., during the AIDS epidemic in this melodramatic memoir ... Unfortunately, much of the book’s endlessly complex and neurotic rumination is lavished on trivial matters: casual hookups in the dunes; longer-term relationships, riddled with small insecurities and betrayals, that feel paper-thin; and simple mishaps ... The result is a callow and uninvolving coming-of-age narrative.
