Shift: A Memoir of Identity and Other Illusions (American Lives) - Softcover

Guisinger, Penny

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1496238907 ISBN 13: 9781496238900

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, 2024

Synopsis

Winner of the 2025 Maine Literary Award

Penny Guisinger was not always attracted to women. In Shift she recounts formative relationships with women and men, including the marriage that produced her two children and ultimately ended in part due to her affair with her now-wife. Beginning her story as straight and ending as queer, she struggles to make sense of how her identity changed so profoundly while leaving her feeling like the same person she’s always been. While covering pivotal periods of her life, including previous relationships and raising her children across the chasm of divorce, Guisinger reaches for quantum physics, music theory, planetary harmonics, palmistry, and more to interrogate her experiences. This personal story plays out against the backdrop of the national debate on same-sex marriage, in rural, easternmost Maine, where Guisinger watched her neighbors vote against the validity of her family.

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.

About this title

About the Author

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.
 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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.

 

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1496238907
• ISBN 13: 9781496238900
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 190