ARTICLE BY ROBIN CLIFFORD WOOD
When you dip into the first few pages of Penny Guisinger’s new memoir “Shift: A Memoir of Identity and Other Illusions,” it is clear you are about to delve into much more than a simple story. And yet, in another way, “Shift” is exactly that — a simple, uplifting, sensuous, heart-fluttering love story. But simple stories can be complicated.
After years of living a heteronormative life that included a fraught marriage and two young children, Guisinger found herself startlingly and deeply attracted to a woman in her rural Maine community. The book grapples with a constellation of “shifts” that Guisinger had to come to terms with: a self that felt split into two impossibly incompatible selves, divorce, coming out, and co-parenting throughout the upheaval.
In one chapter called “Counterfactuals,” Guisinger writes: “Let me be clear. I did not choose to upend my identity and my life and enter the world of the other, but I also did make it a choice. … That I both did and did not have a choice in this transformation does not seem like it can be true, and yet it is.”
“Shift” is an exploration into seeing the impossible as possible. Guisinger navigates her exploration through a multifaceted gem of metaphors, dipping into physics, music, animal behavior, palmistry, and the cosmos. Her book challenges notions of linear time and binaries. Time moves forward and back. Identity shifts, but it also remains unchanged. If this book were a shape, it would be an illusion, a Mobius strip of interwoven ribbons with no beginning or ending.
At the same time, Guisinger’s writing is filled with vivid clarity and incisive sensory images — a trailer hitch crushing a foot into the mud, burnt sweet potato quesadillas, caterpillar feet “like suction cups on my skin,” fingers pressed against the steel strings of a guitar, the soft curve of a neck where it sweeps into a shoulder.
The solidly physical and the ethereal are blended into one rich continuum, a soup of life, including lines like this one: “…stars drilled their way through the dark and appeared like shining pinpoints of hope above our heads.”
Guisinger’s writing has garnered a cascade of accolades, including a Pushcart nomination, three “notables” in Best American Essays, and a Maine Literary Award. She is the founder of the Iota: Conference of Short Prose in Lubec and a former assistant editor at Brevity magazine. Her first book, “Postcards From Here,” is a collection of micro-vignettes. For “Shift,” she said she intended to write “a normal book” in chronological sequence.
“Turns out that’s not the book I know how to write,” she said. “So I ended up with all these little pieces.”
Those pieces are assembled into the “before, during, and after” of Guisinger’s life-altering relationship. The poignancy of part three will be familiar to anyone who knows the struggle for acceptance, both personal and political, for those who find themselves outside of the mainstream.
“The months of questioning everything I was supposed to be had turned my brain into a snow globe and shaken it hard,” writes Guisinger, who also faced conundrums like this one: “In 2011, Kara and I got married in Massachusetts, then were not married anymore once we drove home. In 2012, at the whim of the electorate, we were married again, but not when we filed our federal taxes.”
Guisinger, a rugged DIY-er, loves life in rural Maine. Though she and her wife have a supportive local community, Guisinger also knows threats still exist for LGBTQ people who want to live their lives openly. Nevertheless, she had no qualms about sharing the details of her personal story.
“I was not scared to send it off,” she said. “I’m not a private person. I don’t think there’s anything in this story that hasn’t happened to other people — sex, falling in love, getting divorced. Anyone who’s shocked by that is pretending.”
There is no pretense in “Shift,” only the story of a life, simple, complicated, the way a life should be.
“Shift: A Memoir of Identity and Other Illusions” by Penny Guisinger can be ordered through your local bookstore or online.
