A candid, scorching memoir that emits tenderness and sweet sorrow.
Lisicky (MFA Program/Rutgers Univ.-Camden), 60, returns to his early days as a young, gay man, which he previously wrote about in The Narrow Door (2016, etc.).
Throughout the author’s memoir, the focus is Provincetown, Massachusetts, in the early 1990s, when the author was awarded a residency fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center and was looking forward to escaping dark and dispiriting times at home. It was October as he drove over the hill to view the small town nestled in the “curved coast of the harbor, shining.” Town, as he calls it, and his small room were his new home: “There’s no other place I’d rather be.” At the time, writes Lisicky, he felt he had been “dead too long,” and he was anxious to visit the catwalk that is Commercial Street. The first night, he picked up a tall, blond guy, and they had sex. Lisicky writes a great deal about sex in this memoir. “Sex for me is as essential as food,” he explains. This was the time of the AIDS epidemic, and the author cites a series of statistics that are still shocking nearly three decades later. In 1991, 20,454 people in the U.S. died of AIDS. By the mid-1990s, notes the author, 10% of Town’s gay population died. Written in short, titled sections, the memoir is brutally honest as Lisicky chronicles his search for companionship and love amid sadness, illness, and death. The next few years were a sexual roundelay as the author moved from lover to lover, with assorted affairs along the way. With each new issue of the Town’s Advocate, he turned to the obituaries: “Oh—that guy!...When he looked at me last week I looked back at him, and we were both citizens of Town.” 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.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64445-016-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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