The Exit Is the Entrance
Essays on Escape
Title Details
Pages: 217
Trim size: 5.500in x 8.500in
Formats
Paperback
Pub Date: 09/01/2024
ISBN: 9-780-8203-6733-0
List Price: $24.95
Web PDF
Pub Date: 09/01/2024
ISBN: 9-780-8203-6735-4
List Price: $24.95
EPUB
Pub Date: 09/01/2024
ISBN: 9-780-8203-6734-7
List Price: $24.95
Related Subjects
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs
Relating to lower socioeconomic groups / status
FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS / General
The Exit Is the Entrance
Essays on Escape
Lyrical snapshots of friendship, violence, love, and longing in working-class America
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- Description
- Reviews
Lydia Paar joined the American workforce at age fourteen, holding a wide variety of jobs (twenty-seven, at last count) between then and now, across twenty-five different homes in eight states. The essays in this collection explore her attempts to evade or transform the lower-middle class American experience across various cityscapes, towns, deserts, and in-between places. As she moves through these spaces, she seeks peace, connection, and freedom: from the hip streets of Portland to desolate deserts, Army basic training to cross-country bus trips, to eerie St. Louis funeral homes, and more.
Each essay interrogates the interior emotional work that accompanies such grappling: labors of love and friendship, of learning, of motion, of maintenance, and of finding faith in potential for positive change. Across a range of interior and exterior landscapes, Paar meditates on subcultures, agendas, violences, alliances, and the intersection of the natural world with our human endeavors. Ultimately, she considers how what we try to transform so often transforms us.
—Michael Martone, author of Table Talk and Second Thoughts: A Memoir in Prose Poems
—Nicole Walker, author of Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh, and Navigating Disaster
—Sarah Einstein, author of Mot: A Memoir
Paar is a wanderer, seeker, and unflinching guide through a series of dynamic endings and beginnings that finally lead to a sense of home. As dynamic as the subjects they broach, these essays are razor-sharp—as attuned to life’s sobering realities as to its unexpected sources of light. In partaking of Paar’s collection, we’re reminded of the hard and beautiful necessity of finding our way to what is ours and leaving what is not.
An incisive and insightful debut; stunning in its depth and scope.
—Sonja Livingston, author of Ghostbread
—Gabe Montesanti, author of Brace for Impact: A Memoir