Friday evening Paul Lisicky read from his book The Narrow Door: A Memoir of Friendship at Literati. I went to the event curious, having heard good things about the book but not having read either the memoir or any other of Lisicky’s writings. But I’m always looking for a chance to visit Literati.
The atmosphere was relaxed and cozy; an atmosphere Literati strives to cultivate and almost always seems to achieve. There was a combination of students and older non-students in attendance. Paul Lisicky started the evening by reading a good section from the beginning of his book. I always enjoy hearing writers read their own works; it adds an extra element, listening to the inflection that they imagined it being read with when they wrote it. Lisicky’s language is both vivid and at times impressionistic (in the best way). There was something very poetic about his word choices and the vignette style in which the book is structured added to this effect.
Lisicky’s latest work is a story about his friendship with a fellow writer Denise, who dies from cancer, and his relationship with his ex-husband. Listening to the few pages Lisicky read for us on Friday, they held an interesting mix of very the personal and the larger world.
Following his reading, he sat down and had a guided conversation with Sarah Messer, who also happens to teach at the University of Michigan and is my current poetry teacher. They discussed the process of writing this memoir. He explained how it was a very different experience from most of his works, which are fiction novels. This nonfiction called for a different style. Especially since he started writing it so close after the events of Denise’s death and his breakup. When asked by an audience member how he decided where to stop the story, he said it had kind of fallen into place. He also mused that if he wrote this story later, the make-up, what he included and what he didn’t, would probably change because as he said, “the everything is changeable”. It depends on time and context.
The Narrow Door is for sale at Literati and other booksellers such as Amazon. It’s sure to be an emotional and touching story told with masterful beautiful images of some difficult moments in his life. Myself, I can’t wait to read it!
