The Narrow Door

November 9, 2015
In this fluid, tender memoir of love and loss, novelist Lisicky (Famous Builder) chronicles the two longest relationships of his life: his deep friendship with the writer Denise Gess and his 15-year romance with a renowned poet, here referred to only as M. Written in nonlinear bursts that recall the way memories flit in and out of consciousness, Lisicky brings readers back to the early 1980s, when he was closeted and working as a teaching assistant. He was awed by Gess and her ability to command her students’ attention. She would go on to write well-regarded novels such as Good Deeds. The pair shared everything, but also felt inevitable competition when the balance of success shifted between them. Lisicky weaves in his reactions to natural disasters, such as the earthquake in Haiti and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, with Gess’s decline from cancer and the slow crumbling of his relationship with his husband. At the core of the triad formed by Lisicky and his two literary loves is a devotion to language and its ability to heal and harm. The bond he shared with Gess, though completely platonic, was as intimate as any marriage, and his musings on the ever-fluid nature of friendships, how they ebb and flow over years and surmount hurdles great and small, is breathtaking and heartbreaking.

October 15, 2015
A creative writing professor's memoir of two profoundly intense relationships that permanently marked his life. Lisicky (Unbuilt Projects, 2012, etc.) met novelist Denise Gess in the early 1980s when both were graduate students at Rutgers University. She was everything that he, a then-closeted gay man, was not: vivacious, funny, and "able to hold the attention of an entire group of freshmen." But it was not until Gess' death from cancer that he began to reflect not only on the intense emotional relationship he had with her, but also with the poet, M., whom he married and then divorced. In a nonlinear narrative that moves back and forth in time and space to focus on episodes in the lives of all three main figures, Lisicky portrays not only the details of their lives as working writers, but also the emotional ups and downs he experienced with both his friend and his lover. In the early days of his friendship with Gess, she called Lisicky "two times a day, sometimes for two or three hours at a time." But closeness also bred competitiveness in their professional relationship, as well as a possessiveness that not only suggested the two were "a little in love with each other," but also led to emotional betrayals on both sides. On the other hand, Lisicky's intimate relationship with M. mirrored the unconsummated one he had with Gess in how their connection seemed to reflect "some powerful exchange of psychic materials between [them]." Yet all their closeness did not prevent his husband's eventual departure from the relationship with another man. His world upended by Gess' illness, Lisicky realized a painful truth. The closer he got to people, the more he had to acknowledge their freedom to die and/or leave him. With empathy and emotional finesse, the author renders the fragility of interpersonal connections, and he offers insight into the complicated nature of the human heart. Honest and compassionate.

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