Pauline Fisher, proprietor of a Provincetown shop that many viewed as the heart of the town, died of breast cancer at her home in Miami Beach on March 23, 2025. She had been dividing her time between Cape Cod and Florida for over a decade. She was 63.
After she arrived from New York City in 1994, she established her shop, MAP, which sold apparel, jewelry, and books, among other objects, each of which Pauline chose. Her eye was unerring and entirely her own. MAP was one of those rare stores in which you admired pretty much everything you saw.
Pauline and MAP were inseparable in ways many artists are inseparable from their work. You can’t talk about Pauline without mentioning her brilliance at finding goods possessed of an all-but-indefinable soul and integrity. She knew it when she saw it.
There’s no telling how many of us are heartbroken over her departure.
Pauline was born in Dublin, Ireland on July 21, 1961, the only child of Olive Doyle, an artist, and the late Patrick Doyle, who owned a bar. She grew up in Dublin and studied visual communications at the College of Marketing and Design there. She moved to the U.S. in 1983, living in Key West, Miami Beach, and New York before coming to Provincetown. She became a U.S. citizen a few years ago but returned to Dublin regularly, where in recent years she embraced sea swimming at the famous Forty Foot.
Pauline was wry and funny and generous. She had a presence — that is, she emanated more personal force than most of us do. Those qualities lived in her alongside a general aspect of modesty and hard-headed practicality, which I referred to as her Irishness. She was staunch and resolute — so much so that if I had told her she was fabulous, she’d have scoffed at the idea.
Trust me. She was fabulous.
Pauline and I were friends for more than 30 years. I once mentioned to her that, when I was younger, I’d worked in bars to pay the rent while trying to become a writer, and I wondered if I’d have been happier working in a cool shop like hers.
She replied, “Well, you can work here now if you’d like.”
And so, for years, I worked one day per summer as a shop boy at MAP. We eventually increased my hours to two days per summer, because it always took me a full day to remember how to work the register.
I wasn’t the only friend who worked in her shop. “I played store detective against shoplifters on crowded days,” says John Waters. “My only business advice that she refused to do was to yell, ‘Thanks for not buying anything!’ when a customer left empty-handed.”
Pauline was kind but could be formidable when she needed to be. Woe to the poor fool who stole a knitted cap from the shop one summer. Pauline rampaged down Commercial Street, tracked him to another store, and called out, “This man is a thief!”
She got the cap back.
She was a private person who listened and cared but didn’t reveal very much. And she never gossiped, ever, about anybody.
“Like many of us, Pauline longed for home,” says artist James Balla. “I feel she found the truest home in the hearts of her friends.”
I swung by the shop every day I was in Provincetown just to see her. About half my clothes come from MAP. My husband, Kenny, has declared his intention to be buried in a sweatshirt he bought from Pauline.
“Pauline was born cool,” says musician Billy Hough. “She’d work with famous designers and local artists alike, with small labels trying to get a foothold in the business. Huge labels would send spies with cameras to determine if rockabilly was returning, or if neon could be punk.”
I wasn’t the only one who checked in with her constantly. She may have been the most widely loved person I’ve ever known — an assertion she would have dismissed.
“Pauline was a big sister, benevolent aunt, stern headmistress, fearless captain, grande dame, and a golden rose,” says her friend Steven Dornbush. “She was unwavering and absolute in everything she did.”
“The fabric of Provincetown life seems to be getting thinner and more fragile with each year, with more holes and tears,” says gallerist Albert Merola. “Without Pauline here, we may all become more aware of just how precious and tenuous our connections are.”
She was a person of powerful convictions. “When we were all losing friends to AIDS, Pauline and I would sometimes talk about how we’d like our memorials to be,” says Mitch Yates, a former business partner. “The music she wanted was the Sex Pistols’ version of ‘I Did It My Way.’ ”
Few of us were surprised to learn that, when her cancer was diagnosed, she refused chemotherapy in favor of herbal remedies and a severe dietary regimen. “She wanted to do treatments her way, even though it wasn’t what doctors encouraged,” says her friend Christine Gero Horovitz. “She didn’t tell a lot of people because she didn’t want people to treat or look at her differently.”
Pauline is survived by her mother, Olive Doyle, and by an aunt, Jean Carroll, both of Dublin, Ireland.
After her diagnosis she gave herself two years of the richest imaginable life. “Aware that her time might be short, she took every opportunity for adventure,” says Eileen Wegge. “She bought the concert ticket, booked the flight, accepted the invitation. She was an inspiration to live every day to its fullest.”
Her passing was not unexpected, but it came so suddenly that I had just texted her about getting together in Miami next month when I heard that she had died.
As John Waters says, “I can’t imagine Provincetown without her.”
