Shift

A Memoir of Identity and Other Illusions

Penny Guisinger

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2024
• ISBN:
  9781496239860
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• 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
• About Penny Guisinger
• Series List