Shift: A Memoir of Identity and Other Illusions: American Lives
Autor Penny Guisingeren Limba Engleză Paperback – mar 2024
Shift examines sexual and romantic fluidity while wrestling with the ways past and present mingle rather than staying in linear narratives. Under scrutiny, Guisinger’s sense of her own identity becomes like a Mobius strip or Penrose triangle—an optical illusion that challenges the dimensions and possibilities of the world.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9781496238900
ISBN-10: 1496238907
Pagini: 190
Dimensiuni: 140 x 216 x 15 mm
Greutate: 0.25 kg
Editura: Nebraska
Colecția University of Nebraska Press
Seria American Lives
Locul publicării:United States
ISBN-10: 1496238907
Pagini: 190
Dimensiuni: 140 x 216 x 15 mm
Greutate: 0.25 kg
Editura: Nebraska
Colecția University of Nebraska Press
Seria American Lives
Locul publicării:United States
Notă biografică
Penny Guisinger is the author of Postcards from Here. Her work has appeared in Fourth Genre, Guernica, River Teeth, The Rumpus, and Solstice Literary Magazine and has won numerous honors, including three notable designations from Best American Essays, a Maine Literary Award, and a Pushcart Prize nomination. She lives at the easternmost tip of Maine with her wife, two teenagers, and a slowly increasing number of dogs.
Extras
Shift and Back Up
Kara and I like implementers and persuaders made of steel, like
hammers and pry bars, saws and wrenches. We like equipment
and dirt. We like weekend projects. I like to put on leather work
gloves, lower the tongue of our utility trailer onto my car’s ball
hitch, drop the safety chains into the rust-crusted holes, and turn
the stubborn knob, tightening the rig into a locked position,
ready to haul firewood, the rototiller, or loam. I like to do these
things wearing a ball cap and a work shirt with ripped-out
elbows.
Kara found the utility trailer on Craig’s List. It was an incredible
deal. Black steel with rugged tires and a two-bar rail around
three sides, worth the two-hour trip through the woods to Bangor,
Maine, to meet the guy in a strip mall parking lot, where we
handed him cash and switched the trailer from his car to mine.
Having a hitch installed on my Honda cost as much as the trailer
itself, but we wanted it. We didn’t predict that the trailer would
be the thing that revealed our deficiencies. Hadn’t we already
logged enough self-improvement hours that year? We should
have been perfect.
All that summer, the trailer bumped along behind us, hauling
seaweed and composted manure from the organic dairy farm
across the bay. We had mowed and tilled a large rectangle of field
outside our house, and by amending it with nutrients and micro-organisms,
we negotiated with that clay earth until it turned
into soil. We loaded the trailer with pitchfork loads of dripping,
rotting sugar kelp, bladderwort, sea lettuce, and dulse harvested
from below the high-water mark on the boat ramp, then drove
home and spread it across the garden. We hoisted pointy shovels
to slop globs of cow manure from the trailer’s deck, tried not to
inhale the smell as we pushed it into the place where tomatoes
would grow. We wore caps and gloves and down vests and jeans
and work boots. Flannel and serious expressions.
The Honda crv, with its five-speed, standard transmission, was
chosen to pull the trailer, as it was the larger and more powerful
of our two vehicles. This was fine, except that I did not know
how to back the trailer down the boat ramp, across the yard into
the garden, or anywhere else. Backing up a trailer is a process of
counterintuitive thinking and spatial relations that I wasn’t born
with. Now I know to grab the steering wheel with one hand at
the six o’clock position and to move that hand whichever direction
I want the back of the trailer to go, but that skill was yet to
come. Kara, on the other hand, could back up a trailer but had
never learned the ballet of integrating her two feet, the car’s three
pedals, the steering wheel, and the stick.
But we were innovators. We designed a system. To back up,
we would park the car, unhitch the trailer, and maneuver it into
position by hand. Then I would back the car up to the stationary
trailer, and we would lift and reattach. No problem.
That worked for the summer, but our unskillfulness would
not be bypassed forever. One fall day, we had the trailer loaded
with seaweed, and we struggled to move it into the garden. I
had driven close to the edge of the tilled ground, near where
the kale would grow in the spring. Kara held the trailer tongue
from one side, and I had a glove-covered hold from the other,
and we tried to drag it across a bumpy section of ground between
my car and the garden. Its large, black tires sank into a low spot,
and we threw all the strength in our bodies into hauling it up
over the lip. It resisted and tugged back, wrestling itself out of
our hands. The steel tongue of the fully loaded trailer dropped
directly onto the top of my foot.
I sank to the ground, unable to speak. Kara jumped to get my
foot free. I lay on the ground, eyes closed, while Kara slid the
trailer off my thin, rubber boot, then the boot off my foot. She
said, “Don’t move.”
We stayed there for a minute, me on my back, her holding my
throbbing foot on her bent knee. Around us, birds that hadn’t
left with the summer sang their autumn songs and clouds slid
across an expanse of sky. I finally managed to say, “That landed
on my foot.”
She stroked my calf. “I know.”
The ground was soft, and the trailer had pushed my foot into
the mud rather than breaking the bones, but it was badly bruised.
We had traveled rougher terrain, hauling heavier loads, but we
weren’t done.
I had to learn to back up and shift at the same time.
Kara and I like implementers and persuaders made of steel, like
hammers and pry bars, saws and wrenches. We like equipment
and dirt. We like weekend projects. I like to put on leather work
gloves, lower the tongue of our utility trailer onto my car’s ball
hitch, drop the safety chains into the rust-crusted holes, and turn
the stubborn knob, tightening the rig into a locked position,
ready to haul firewood, the rototiller, or loam. I like to do these
things wearing a ball cap and a work shirt with ripped-out
elbows.
Kara found the utility trailer on Craig’s List. It was an incredible
deal. Black steel with rugged tires and a two-bar rail around
three sides, worth the two-hour trip through the woods to Bangor,
Maine, to meet the guy in a strip mall parking lot, where we
handed him cash and switched the trailer from his car to mine.
Having a hitch installed on my Honda cost as much as the trailer
itself, but we wanted it. We didn’t predict that the trailer would
be the thing that revealed our deficiencies. Hadn’t we already
logged enough self-improvement hours that year? We should
have been perfect.
All that summer, the trailer bumped along behind us, hauling
seaweed and composted manure from the organic dairy farm
across the bay. We had mowed and tilled a large rectangle of field
outside our house, and by amending it with nutrients and micro-organisms,
we negotiated with that clay earth until it turned
into soil. We loaded the trailer with pitchfork loads of dripping,
rotting sugar kelp, bladderwort, sea lettuce, and dulse harvested
from below the high-water mark on the boat ramp, then drove
home and spread it across the garden. We hoisted pointy shovels
to slop globs of cow manure from the trailer’s deck, tried not to
inhale the smell as we pushed it into the place where tomatoes
would grow. We wore caps and gloves and down vests and jeans
and work boots. Flannel and serious expressions.
The Honda crv, with its five-speed, standard transmission, was
chosen to pull the trailer, as it was the larger and more powerful
of our two vehicles. This was fine, except that I did not know
how to back the trailer down the boat ramp, across the yard into
the garden, or anywhere else. Backing up a trailer is a process of
counterintuitive thinking and spatial relations that I wasn’t born
with. Now I know to grab the steering wheel with one hand at
the six o’clock position and to move that hand whichever direction
I want the back of the trailer to go, but that skill was yet to
come. Kara, on the other hand, could back up a trailer but had
never learned the ballet of integrating her two feet, the car’s three
pedals, the steering wheel, and the stick.
But we were innovators. We designed a system. To back up,
we would park the car, unhitch the trailer, and maneuver it into
position by hand. Then I would back the car up to the stationary
trailer, and we would lift and reattach. No problem.
That worked for the summer, but our unskillfulness would
not be bypassed forever. One fall day, we had the trailer loaded
with seaweed, and we struggled to move it into the garden. I
had driven close to the edge of the tilled ground, near where
the kale would grow in the spring. Kara held the trailer tongue
from one side, and I had a glove-covered hold from the other,
and we tried to drag it across a bumpy section of ground between
my car and the garden. Its large, black tires sank into a low spot,
and we threw all the strength in our bodies into hauling it up
over the lip. It resisted and tugged back, wrestling itself out of
our hands. The steel tongue of the fully loaded trailer dropped
directly onto the top of my foot.
I sank to the ground, unable to speak. Kara jumped to get my
foot free. I lay on the ground, eyes closed, while Kara slid the
trailer off my thin, rubber boot, then the boot off my foot. She
said, “Don’t move.”
We stayed there for a minute, me on my back, her holding my
throbbing foot on her bent knee. Around us, birds that hadn’t
left with the summer sang their autumn songs and clouds slid
across an expanse of sky. I finally managed to say, “That landed
on my foot.”
She stroked my calf. “I know.”
The ground was soft, and the trailer had pushed my foot into
the mud rather than breaking the bones, but it was badly bruised.
We had traveled rougher terrain, hauling heavier loads, but we
weren’t done.
I had to learn to back up and shift at the same time.
Cuprins
Author’s Note
Shift and Back Up
Part 1
Imperfect Rings
We Were Just Rehearsing
Bonking into Each Other in the Dark
Before There Was a Woman
I Was a Good Girlfriend
After Tall Probably Gay Steve, Third Steve I Didn’t Love Back, and a Marc
We Are All at the Edge
Provincetown I
Not Not a Tenant
Untying the Knot
Part 2
The Love Poetry of Food
Closer to Fine
Things You Don’t Know
Pulling Out the Stops
Gay Parties
Harmony of the Spheres
Quantum Music
Tonal Regions
Rose Garden
The Encyclopedia of Good Mothers
Please Don’t Notice Me
Earth, Wind, and Fire
Counterfactuals
Why We Got Divorced
Coming Out
Pink Capos at the Lobster Party
Provincetown II
The Largest Canyon on Earth
Breakdown
Is This Parenting?
Part 3
Tight Margins and Powerful Strangers
Across the Bridge
I Dreamed I Was at the Funeral of an Activist
Waxwings
Squaring the Circle
Impossible Objects
Acknowledgments
Shift and Back Up
Part 1
Imperfect Rings
We Were Just Rehearsing
Bonking into Each Other in the Dark
Before There Was a Woman
I Was a Good Girlfriend
After Tall Probably Gay Steve, Third Steve I Didn’t Love Back, and a Marc
We Are All at the Edge
Provincetown I
Not Not a Tenant
Untying the Knot
Part 2
The Love Poetry of Food
Closer to Fine
Things You Don’t Know
Pulling Out the Stops
Gay Parties
Harmony of the Spheres
Quantum Music
Tonal Regions
Rose Garden
The Encyclopedia of Good Mothers
Please Don’t Notice Me
Earth, Wind, and Fire
Counterfactuals
Why We Got Divorced
Coming Out
Pink Capos at the Lobster Party
Provincetown II
The Largest Canyon on Earth
Breakdown
Is This Parenting?
Part 3
Tight Margins and Powerful Strangers
Across the Bridge
I Dreamed I Was at the Funeral of an Activist
Waxwings
Squaring the Circle
Impossible Objects
Acknowledgments
Recenzii
"One hat trick of good memoir writing is that, in presenting an intimately specific life story, readers find unexpected affinities and insights that resonate with their own experiences. That's to say, Shift has something to offer to anyone who has ever realized, midway through the drive, that it's time to scrap the roadmap. It's for anyone who has ever taken stock of life's twists and turns, marveling at how it's possible to come so far and still be yourself."—Genanne Walsh, Portland Press Herald
“Memoir may be the story of the self in time, but in this engaging, surprising book Penny Guisinger sidesteps the obvious and employs a host of unexpected ideas . . . to examine a lifetime’s progress toward genuine love and an authentic life. The result is a terrific contribution to queer literature and a wonderfully fresh, irresistible delight.”—Mark Doty, National Book Award winner and author of Heaven’s Coast
“The specificity of this memoir—its depth, its nuance, its balance, and its story—grips you and doesn’t let go. I loved every word. Penny writes with such grace and honesty and love that you too won’t want this book to leave your bookshelf, let alone your hands. Shift is a stunningly powerful memoir.”—Morgan Talty, best-selling author of Night of the Living Rez
“Guisinger’s honesty had me from the get-go. Read it, fall in love as I did, learn something you may not yet know. Did I mention Penny Guisinger is also very funny? She is also very funny.”—Abigail Thomas, author of Still Life at Eighty: The Next Interesting Thing
“What I love most about this smart, edgy memoir is how it celebrates love, in all its permutations, how in it, who we love and how are more important than what we are called, than what we call ourselves. It imagines a world which accepts that to be human is to shift, where a foreshortened marriage is not a failure but a limited success, where it is possible to find safety, self, a path through our altering personal geometries to a place where we can love intelligently, with candor and without masks.”—Pam Houston, author of Deep Creek: Finding Hope in The High Country
“Each sentence in this book is a delightful jewel, and the sum of these sentences asks, ‘What is time? Am I the selves I was, who I pretended to be, and the selves that have grown into the present?’ Guisinger tracks love and days as they wink and flitter within and beyond timelines and roles, creating a breathtaking quantum nonfiction portrait.”—Sonya Huber, author of Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System
“In Shift Penny Guisinger brings us slowly and methodically into the cracks and fissures of her quietly changing domesticity. After entering her first marriage childless, straight, and fairly certain of her future, Guisinger leaves it a mother of two, queer, and uncertain of what lies ahead. With trademark wit and a well-honed voice, Guisinger delicately guides readers through a shifting landscape of reckoning and renewal. Brilliantly written and beautifully rendered, Shift is a moving, lyrical inquiry into the poetics of liberation, of what it means to risk it all to become who you always were.”—Timothy Hillegonds, author of The Distance Between: A Memoir
“I read Shift with my heart in my throat. It’s both the most romantic book I’ve encountered in ages and a clear-eyed dissection of romance’s consequences when falling in love means reinventing not just a life, but a self. This urgent, wry, deeply reflective book will be with me for a long time.”—Kristi Coulter, author of Nothing Good Can Come from This
“Shift is the story of hard-won love, told with an honesty that includes heartbroken children, sexual euphoria, and the crooked road toward remaking a family.”—Monica Wood, author of When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir from Mexico, Maine
“In Shift Penny Guisinger takes us on a lyrical journey to self. And it’s a beautiful story: a young teen groping for identity—a queer identity—grows into a self-possessed, independent woman negotiating family and friendship, career and romance, mind-work and hard physical work. By turns harrowing, hilarious, erotic, wise, and calm, honest and cagey, poetic and profound, Shift is a joy to read, and Penny Guisinger a delightful storyteller and thinker. Don’t start the book late at night, you’ll get less sleep than Penny during a first lesbian encounter: Yes, those are birds singing, and we’ve spent the night in bliss.”—Bill Roorbach, author of Summers with Juliet, Lucky Turtle, and Beep
Descriere
In Shift, a personal inquiry into midlife lesbianism, Penny Guisinger examines sexual and romantic fluidity while wrestling with the ways past and present intermingle rather than staying in linear narratives.