Later: My Life at the Edge of the World

By: Paul Lisicky, 2020, Greywolf Press

Paul Lisicky's 2020 memoir, Later: My Life at the Edge of the World, focuses on the 1990s AIDS crisis in Provincetown, Massachusetts, which is indeed at the edge of one errant spit of land thrusting its arm bravely out into the Atlantic, the fist—Provincetown—flexed back toward the wrist.

In Later, rather unexpectedly, several of Lisicky’s most poignant passages center on a dog, Arden, whose owner Wally is dying from AIDS.

Kenneled

Arden must wonder why Wally has stopped taking him for walks. And his confusion around that might account for the fact he’s eating so much. Whenever Wally cannot finish breakfast, he gives it to Arden, and as a result Arden has swollen to the size of a small household bruin. The weight puts extra pressure on his hips, his joints. It takes effort for him to stand, and he wobbles a bit when he carries himself from one side of the room to the other.

The AIDS crisis leaves no one in town untouched, not even the dog. At one point, the narrator drives Arden to the kennel, and we, the reader, too, begin to feel undone.

Arden has been to the kennel many times before—it is said that he feels at home there—so of course there is no problem getting him into the front seat of the car. He seems perfectly content, a gentleman in the passenger’s seat…But his head looks left as soon as I turn onto Nauset Road: maybe he already smells the poop, the obedience, the fear. Still, he keeps his chivalrous posture. He has too much dignity to whimper or whine. I park… He will not move; even when I try to pick him up by the haunches he will not move. He has willed himself to weigh ten cinder blocks. He wants me to get the message. He has put up with enough, enough change, enough with being a good boy, dammit. He is middle-aged. And now he is losing his human, whom he’s been watching out forever…

Writers have surely considered the AIDS epidemic from many points of view, but rarely from the canine. Later is woven from short, compelling essays on topics that include mothers, friendship, and Provincetown itself. The writing soars in so many sections.

Mother

What has happened to my mother? It isn’t enough to say she’s gotten older. All people, if they’re lucky, get older. Skin sags, hands mottle, eyes and brows lighten as if bleached from within, but some people are still themselves. Some keep their energy, their sense of humor, their charisma. I hold the photo she sends me in my hand. My brothers and I blame our father for exhausting her, but … now she she carries herself with a caution that suggests she never knew what it was like to attract others, both men and woman. Maybe this is how culture kills you, not through isolation or boredom or soul-impoverishing distraction, but by telling you that beauty is trouble.

Elsewhere, chafing against the constraints forged by his origins, the narrator ruminates about identity, seeking to claim his authentic life.

I tear into the harness, which is already several sizes too small. The harness that has been in use through many generations, on both sides of the family, its hide cut from early Catholicism, not enough money, class aspiration, learned passivity, practicality, family catastrophe. By tearing into it, I challenge and threaten everyone else who says no, no, no, no, no to themselves. That doesn’t mean I don’t feel shame and regret. Throwing off that harness is like coming out. It doesn’t happen just once, the way they say it does in the literature of identity politics. No, I do it very day of my life. The practice keeps me alert, awake. And it still manages to chafe my skin red.

Readers of Dog Years: A Memoir, published in 2007 by Lisicky’s former husband, the National Book Award poet Mark Doty, will remember both the dog Arden and Lisicky himself, as the character Paul.

Despite the misfortune of a March 17, 2020 publication date-– no luck of the Irish in launching four days into America’s entrance into the global pandemic— Later ranked among NPR's recommended memoirs of that first pandemic year.