Lisicky does not explicitly lay out the feeling of a long friendship, he does not try to essentialize it to a paragraph or an aphorism - how could he? The Narrow Door brings out his long friendship with Gess over the run of 200 pages, as background, as the mood of the whole work. It resists narrative structure, even with death, and is stretched over years where the presence of the thing is more substantial than the activity. Friendship is a difficult subject, more difficult to write about than love. I will join with every other critic I can find in that. "A memoir of friendship" deceives by sounding simple. But The Narrow Door only goes back as far as their meeting, only goes on through the consequences of her death. Lisicky and Gess are sometimes closer and sometimes not. The Narrow Door is an account of both losses, an account of the friendship most of all. In 2009, Lisicky was recently married to the poet Mark Doty. Paul Lisicky was her best friend of 20 years. The basic facts of the book: In 2009, the writer Denise Gess, most famously of Good Deeds (1985) and Firestorm at Peshtigo (2003), died of lung cancer in Philadelphia.
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