Illuminating Fiction

Paul Lisicky: Looking for Surprise

109 Paul Lisicky Looking for Surprise Paul Lisicky’s books include Lawnboy and Famous Builder. His shorter work has appeared in Ploughshares, Short Takes, Open House, Flash Fiction, Prairie Schooner, Boulevard, Creating Nonfiction, Truth in Nonfiction and in many other anthologies and magazines. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, his awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, the Henfield Foundation, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he was twice a Winter Fellow. He has taught at Cornell University, New York University, Sarah Lawrence College, Antioch University, and the University of Houston, and is a member of the writing committee of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He divides his time between New York City and Fire Island, New York. His new novel, Lumina Harbor, is forthcoming. Recently he spoke with me by phone from his Manhattan apartment. Sherry Ellis: You’ve written Lawnboy, a novel, many short stories, and now Famous Builder, a memoir. How does it feel to read about your own life in print? Paul Lisicky: Well, that’s a tough one. I think of Famous Builder as a version of my life, but not my life. Every moment in time is so complex; you learn pretty quickly that it’s too complicated to dramatize in every dimension . You try your damnedest to do that, but there’s always more to say—and thank God for that. Memoir to me is so much about picking and choosing descriptions and incidents in support of the theme. The final result doesn’t feel that much different, at least imaginatively, from a novel or a poem. It’s been so worked on the language level that you end up feeling some distance from it. Which is a relief. That distance makes the task of memoir bearable. 110 Illuminating Fiction Ellis: In her book The Situation and the Story, Vivian Gornick states, “the narrator becomes a persona . . . a tone of voice, its angle of vision, the rhythm of sentences, what it selects to observe and ignore are chosen to serve the subject.” How do you think you’ve created a persona as the result of writing Famous Builder? Lisicky: I’ve always been drawn to any kind of creative work that wants to do something with the signature of individual character. With Famous Builder, I tried my best to enact speech patterns and points of view that I like to think of as unique to me. But there’s a bit of distance between who I am at any given moment and who the speaker is. The speaker’s tone, the choice of detail—both are informed by the moment in time from which the writer creates. There’s no reason to think that I couldn’t write about the same material covered in Famous Builder at a later date from a different point of view. The actor Dirk Bogarde apparently did that in a series of memoirs he wrote over the course of a lifetime. In one book his mother is kinder than a saint; in another, she’s a disaster! Ellis: Famous Builder begins when you are in elementary school, with you and your fellow classmates changing identities with one another and trying to fool a substitute teacher as to who you are. Why did you choose this beginning? Lisicky: It seemed false to me to write a book that explored just one thread of my identity. If I were writing a book that focused only on my life as a gay man, I’d have to leave out too much of what I know about myself. Similarly, if I wrote about myself solely as the grandson of Eastern European immigrants , I’d run into the same problem. That’s why the opening paragraphs are about the frustration of carrying a single name to the grave. I wanted to write a book that represented the complexity of how we understand ourselves. By foregrounding that classroom scene, the book argues against the notion that anyone is built of a singular identity. I also thought it was important to open with a group drama. The boundaries in that classroom loosen, and there’s a sense of joyousness about the collective. A certain anarchic spirit emerges again and again in the book, in which the speaker understands himself not as a single being hemmed in by his mortal body, but as a...