A Gay Man Remembers His Awakening, as AIDS Shook His World

5 Things About Your Book The memoirist and novelist Paul Lisicky says that “versions” of his experiences in Provincetown, Mass. — the Cape Cod community renowned as an art colony and a thriving home for the L. G. B.

T. Q. community — have appeared in his previous work. But his new book, “Later: My Life at the Edge of the World,” intimately and extensively recounts the time he spent there in the early 1990s, growing into his own, sexually and emotionally, in a community grappling with the AIDS epidemic.

On one page, Lisicky remembers wondering: “How will I ever be able to leave this haven, so far from the repression and punishments of adulthood? Am I trapped in sweetness now? ” And soon after, he’s describing the men who had come to Provincetown to live out their last days. “A retirement community,” he calls the town.

“Say, Sun City, Ariz. , but for young men in their 20s and 30s. ” Below, Lisicky talks about the project’s false starts, learning not to suppress anger, his longtime love of Joni Mitchell’s music and more. When did you first get the idea to write this book?

I started a version of it in 1997. I felt compelled at that moment to write about the community of Provincetown, and I didn’t know quite how to do it. The first version of the book was a novel, and I wrote maybe 75 pages. It wasn’t as multifaceted emotionally as it needed to be.

It felt a little too neat and orderly, and the two people who saw it, politely and unpolitely, said “No. ” And I was a little crushed, but I put it aside. In 2015, my father became ill with pneumonia, and the sequence of his illness seemed really familiar to me from an earlier time, even though he was 91 years old and not H. I.

V. positive. I needed a container for feeling. I had a residency at Yaddo about five weeks after my father died, and those years that had been present in my imagination for decades all of a sudden felt tangible to me.