The Vitality of Opposing Energies: The Millions Interviews Paul Lisicky
There’s a refrain of naming in Later: My Life at the Edge of the World, the new memoir by Paul Lisicky. The book follows Lisicky’s life in Provincetown, Mass., during the 1990s. A fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center brings Lisicky to the town, but his life as a young writer becomes intertwined with a search for identity and love.
Lisicky’s prose style is enticing, rhythmic in its route toward emotional authenticity. He tries to identify how his relationships could be named or described. “Do I simply want to own him,” Lisicky wonders, “Or do I want to be owned by him…I wonder if intimacy and attachment are possible without the roof of a category.”
One reason Later is so compelling is that Lisicky mines this difficult space of intimacy so well: allowing the possibility that we might never truly name our deepest desires.
The author of The Narrow Door, Famous Builder, The Burning House, and other books of nonfiction and fiction, Lisicky is an associate professor in the MFA Program at Rutgers University-Camden. He has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Tin House, and was a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow.
We spoke about the symbolism and sense of water, how writing can be a way of saying goodbye, and our mutual admiration for Joy Williams.
Among epigraphs from , , , and others, there’s a great paragraph from ’s novel , which includes the lines: “we are more water than dust. It is our origin and destination.” This hit me before I read, I’m even more drawn to the sentiment. Could you talk about being water; being surrounded by water? And about origins and destinations?
