The Exit Is the Entrance: Essays on Escape

by Lydia Paar

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.

Genres: Essays

217 pages, Paperback

Published September 1, 2024

About the author

Lydia Paar is an essayist and fiction writer. Her essay, “Erasure,” was of notable mention in the 2022 Best American Essays collection, and was the 2020 winner of North American Review’s Terry Tempest Williams Creative Nonfiction Prize. The New England Review nominated her as a finalist for their 2021 Emerging Writers Award, and works of hers have been showcased in such publications as Huffpost, Literary Hub, The Missouri Review, Essay Daily, Witness, Farmerish, Hayden's Ferry Review, and COMP, and has been nominated for such prizes as the Pushcart and Best of the Net. An MFA recipient from Washington University and an MA recipient from Northern Arizona University, Paar is also a former recipient of a Frederick and Frances Sommer Foundation Fellowship and of a Millay Arts Residency. She serves as co-editor for the NOMAD Review and teaches writing at the University of Arizona. Her first full-length essay collection, The Entrance is the Exit: Essays on Escape, was released in 2024 from the University of Georgia Press.

Reviews

[Ethan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some really powerful, intimate, timely, down to earth, and clear eyed writing here. I loved it

[L · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Exit Is the Entrance isn’t a collection about employment; although each essay focuses on one of the hodgepodge of jobs Lydia Paar has held, it is far more about the people that circle the narrator during that season of her life—both helpers and threats. This is a heartbreaking collection of different forms of intimacy. These are essays about being left and leaving. They are about the shift that happens between youth and adulthood when the light changes—those exact moments where the author didn’t bloom but grew.

[Kate Belt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Paar won the 2020 Terry Tempest Williams Prize for Nonfiction. I applaud her courage for diving into some deep, dark subjects, especially addressing funeral practices toward the end of the book. Trigger warning, this gets graphic. Her own story of resilience offers hope, as she writes, “It’s possible to write the endings of our stories far away from where they started, characters baby-stepping toward better.”

[Jeremy Carr · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best contemporary nonfiction I've read in some time. Paar's fearless and honest account of her own story is both enlightening and heartrending. 50 years from now, people will be able to read this book and know what it was like to be alive, and surviving, for those living in today's America. This one will stay with me as I go.