Pandemic Reading: The Year in the United States

As the COVID-19 pandemic, protests against racist police violence, and the 2020 presidential election roiled American life, book culture, like everything else, was disrupted. Bookstores and libraries closed their doors. Some book tours were moved online, but my usual habit of browsing for newly published life writing vanished. I live in a city where local authors launch books and writers swing through on tour. How I miss squeezing into the improvised presentation spaces of bookstores, the bonhomie of interviewers and authors, and the surprise question by a shopper who was just looking for a travel book but stayed to listen to the presentation. Small losses in a terrible year, but they reveal larger truths: namely, that while reading is a personal, intimate experience, book culture relies on our public, collective life. In cafés, bars, parks, and other places where we gather to talk or simply be alone with others, our shared anonymous life became "socially distanced," and this impacted how, what, and where we read and write. We don't know what kind of life writing the pandemic will yield. The books that were published this year, however, share a strange bond. Their writers could not have anticipated that their publication dates would coincide with a global health crisis, yet many of them spoke uncannily to the moment.

Paul Lisicky's Later: My Life at the Edge of the World is such a book, published in March 2020 as the first lockdowns were ordered in the US. Later takes us to Provincetown, Massachusetts, in the 1990s, where Lisicky, author of an essay collection, two memoirs, and award-winning fiction, is beginning a prestigious fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center. More than ready to leave behind the "too anxious" (6) boy he was and his all-consuming mother, Lisicky sheds the old and takes on the new in a place he calls "Town." The "edge" in the subtitle refers both to the physical place situated at the tip of Cape Cod, where dunes, light, and water alchemize into something like paradise, and also to coming out far from his home and family. Later is a memoir of queer growing-up in a place teeming with life and creativity in the midst of the AIDS pandemic.

Lisicky describes his own alchemical queer makeover. He jettisons his J. Crew outfits, "the ubiquitous costuming of my 20s, the look of inclusion and aspiration, but also the look that once allowed me to disappear," for Doc Martens, a new haircut, and skinny white jeans: "I expect clothes to do all the work of identity, as does practically everybody." And it works: "It's surprising how quickly I take to this new appearance, as if my body had always been waiting for it" (57). The transformation enables him to access and represent his power:

I stand up straighter, my shoulders fall backward as if they've been held up for too long by pulleys and strings. My walk changes too, or so I imagine: my heels strike the pavement as if I'm possibly damaging my feet. This is what power feels like, but only when power is spread evenly, or when queerness isn't othered but is central. I look at people's faces; people look back at me, not exactly with need but curiosity. Who are you?

(13)

"Who am I" and "Who are you" represent the ethical core of life writing. These questions tap into the drama of knowing the self in relation to others—not only the importance of it, but the deprivation of becoming when relation is thwarted by the closet and a pandemic.

Later is retrospective without being nostalgic. Lisicky's beautiful, restrained writing shows that queer elegy and queer utopia coexist. And change. Lisicky is reflecting on his early adulthood from the perspective of 2018, "later" as the title tells us, when he begins taking PrEP, the HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis. From this vantage point, he untangles the intertwining of HIV fear with "other fears" named and unnamed. The ability to take PrEP has transformed fear and eroticism generationally: "When people in...