A writer recalls his search for love and community in Provincetown, Mass., during the AIDS epidemic in this melodramatic memoir. Fiction writer and memoirist Lisicky (The Narrow Door) spent several years in the early 1990s in Provincetown, a Cape Cod resort, artist's colony, and gay mecca, doing a writing fellowship and trying to sort out his late-20s life. He found the town an exhilarating haven, where he could finally live his homosexuality loud and proud--"Hey, do you want to get high and have sex?" inquired one random guy on the street shortly after he arrived--but also a death-haunted place where recently healthy acquaintances faded from AIDS before his eyes. Lisicky finds affecting moments of pathos in the declining health and deaths of friends ("The churches in Town turn their backs on the sick in Town, but that is not why I turned my back on God"). Unfortunately, much of the book's endlessly complex and neurotic rumination is lavished on trivial matters: casual hookups in the dunes; longer-term relationships, riddled with small insecurities and betrayals, that feel paper-thin; and simple mishaps ("It feels like the toppling is connected to some secret instinct in myself that is driven to ruin," he frets when a fake oversized ice-cream cone he is wearing in a parade falls off his head). The result is a callow and uninvolving coming-of-age narrative. (Mar.)

Provincetown, Massachusetts, in the 1990s was a world apart, a special place if you were a member of the LGBTQ community. Lisicky arrived as the bohemian town at the edge of Cape Cod was consumed by the AIDS crisis after he had been offered a seven-month residency. With reports of so many young men dying from AIDS and AIDS-related illnesses, his mother expresses her fear that her son will also succumb to the disease while "living among" his "own kind," as Lisicky says. And yet to Lisicky, Provincetown is the place that can give him things that his own hometown can't provide: a sense of freedom, sexual and otherwise, that he had never experienced before. But first he had to overcome some deep-seated insecurities. Maybe the foundation made a mistake, he thinks. After all, he reasons, it takes him hours to string together even the simplest of paragraphs. What if they find out that he is a fraud? Before long, though, he overcomes his nervous anxiety and finds his groove. A tale of belonging and discovery even amid the shadows of death.