I wrote to Paul Lisicky during our silent spring of 2020, as a global pandemic sent the world home. Each time I emailed him to fix a date for our interview, I knew it wouldn’t be safe to meet in Brooklyn, New York, where we both live. Yet I held out for the possibility that our two minds might somehow come together to commune. I thought back to the rich conversations Paul and I had shared over the course of a week in Portland, Oregon, in 2017, when I was his student at the Tin House Summer Workshop. It was our fond memories of those days that made the interview he gave me over Zoom in June entirely bittersweet.

Our conversation flowed associatively. We jumped across questions, which I’d shared before speaking. (“I did think about them a little bit,” Paul said, “but I didn’t want to think too much. It would be really inert if I memorized something.”) Paul, sixty-one, reflected on scenes from his youth in southern New Jersey, which form the tableau of his memoir-in-essays, Famous Builder (2002). He invited me into vignettes of the extended visits he’s made to Provincetown, Massachusetts, since his years as a writing fellow there during the AIDS crisis, which is the subject of his most recent book, Later: My Life at the Edge of the World (2020). He revisited his books Lawnboy (1998), which is his debut novel and a shimmering queer coming-of-age story, and The Narrow Door: A Memoir of Friendship (2016), which weaves an account of a friend’s death with the story of a painful breakup. Each work offered Paul a chance to think about complexity, uncertainty, and unexpectedness, which are always fully rendered in his sentences. The joy of our conversation, as Paul told me, was that it offered the freedom and the “permission to think across time.”