Paul Lisicky

Calendar
When:
January 29, 2016 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm
2016-01-29T19:00:00-05:00
2016-01-29T20:30:00-05:00
Where:
Literati Bookstore
124 East Washington Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48104
USA
Cost:
Free
Book Reading
Alum Local RC

Paul Lisicky will read from his memoir The Narrow Door.

In The Narrow Door, Paul Lisicky creates a compelling collage of scenes and images drawn from two long-term relationships, one with a woman novelist and the other with his ex-husband, a poet. The contours of these relationships shift constantly. Denise and Paul, stretched by the demands of their writing lives, drift apart, and Paul’s romance begins to falter. And the world around them is frail: environmental catastrophes like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, natural disasters like the earthquake in Haiti, and local disturbances make an unsettling backdrop to the pressing concerns of Denise’s cancer diagnosis and Paul’s impending breakup. Lisicky’s compassionate heart and resilience seem all the stronger in the face of such searing losses. His survival—hard-won, unsentimental, authentic—proves that in turning toward loss, we embrace life.

“The Narrow Door is a book about a long friendship, which means it’s a book about everything in life: love, hope, longing, death, fallings-out, reconciliation, art, dumb jokes, deep loss.  In The Narrow Door, Paul Lisicky proves, again, that he’s one of our finest writers on the intricacies of the human heart. Like all of Lisicky’s work, it’s beautiful and brilliant.”—Elizabeth McCracken, author of Thunderstruck
“Paul Lisicky’s The Narrow Door circumnavigates the often inscrutable forces that bring us in and out of each other’s lives and hearts, while paying welcome homage to the oft-unsung role of friendship in them. While Lisicky bears witness to ‘the hell of wanting [that] has no cure,’ his ship always feels buoyant, by virtue of a narrator whose attentiveness to feelings both big and small is marked throughout by honesty and devotion.”—Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts
“Relentlessly self-revealing, achingly tender in the way he holds his loved ones and the world, Paul Lisicky has written a memoir as raw as Jeff Tweedy fresh from rehab, and just like a Wilco album, packed with tracks, so elegant in their bewilderment and sorrow, you’ll want to visit them again and again. This book charmed me, moved me, upended me, indicted me, compelled me, wrecked me, made me want to say the big YES, made me want to be better than I am.”—Pam Houston, author of Contents May Have Shifted
“I loved this book so much that I found myself slowing to a crawl as I reached the end, not wanting to part ways quite yet. This is a portrait of friendship unlike any I’ve read. In embracing the fluidity of relationships–platonic and romantic, real life  and idolatrous, even human and canine–it reminds us that true connection can be as fleeting and precious as true solitude. There is a unique honesty in that revelation–and also a great if surprising comfort.” —Meghan Daum, author of The Unspeakable
“Intelligent and intimate, fierce and tender, real and raw, Paul Lisicky’s The Narrow Door is an unforgettable memoir about love and loss, friendship and forgiveness. It had me in its thrall from page one.”—Cheryl Strayed
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