“I’m going to escah-pay.” So begins Lydia Paar’s debut essay collection, The Exit Is the Entrance: Essays on Escape. The book is both a work-travel memoir and a penetrating, often poetic deliberation on what it takes to remain intact in a world designed to shatter you. Packaged as a spiritual-philosophical bildungsroman in essay form, The Exit Is the Entrance is something far more valuable: a sensitive account of economic survival.

Born in Portland, Oregon, Paar spends much of her childhood lower middle class in rural Kentucky. She learns how to “escah-pay” after divorce lands her, her mom, and her little brother in grandma’s attic back in Portland. (“You say it like the word ‘agape,’” she writes, “a childlike mispronunciation.”) Whether from family drama or “social snubbing at school,” escaping comes naturally. Paar’s story hereafter is of life on the run. Paar goes AWOL from the military at twenty and works some thirty jobs, living in twenty-five homes across eight states and two countries.​ The book spans wildly different social milieus and topographies, from Portland dive bars and Kentucky ditches to Arizona deserts and St Louis funeral homes. The only thing she can’t quite escape is her student debt — over $150,000 for a college degree that never seems to pay off.

Class memoirs often render their observations about the world in terms of the individual’s triumph over adversity. For these memoirists, social conditions are a backdrop for the hero’s journey, and usually nothing a great deal of grit can’t overcome. In contrast, Paar’s work is highly alert to the world’s injustices. She doesn’t surmount adverse social conditions so much as maneuver around them — usually away from them, though they tend to catch up with her again.

In “Formula,” an essay on religious faith and the spiritual toll of labor, Paar surveys the array of possible beginnings to life as a worker. Some start out “blue-collar trudging for blue plate specials,” she writes, while others “interned en route to rising in rank.” Still others, like Paar, enlist in the military, naively seeing it as an “easy” solution to the cost of higher ed.

Paar is swiftly disabused of that notion in “The Cockroach Prayer,” one of the longest essays in the collection and among its most powerful. Eight weeks into “the grim monotony of basic training” at Fort Jackson, she describes a sudden “snag in my pelvis pulling insistently down, like part of me might clatter out, right there, onto the ground.” Made to run five miles with what she later learns are “two fractured ribs, a fractured pelvis, and a fractured femur,” the narrator winds up in the Army hospital three weeks prior to the start of her fall semester. There she plots her desertion, reflecting, “I’m built, after all, not to kill, but to flee.”

Many memoirists would have plumbed this trauma for all it was worth, recycling its heft across the book for emotional impact. But absent from Paar’s writing is the unspoken entitlement and indignation somewhat common among people with some advantages — in her case being white and a few childhood brushes with the middle class — whose lives turned out much harder than they expected.

Among recent nonfiction books on class mobility and higher ed, Stephanie Land’s Class is the most obvious comparison. But while Land’s memoir maintains a more conventional focus on individual trauma, The Exit Is the Entrance has a roving eye. Paar astutely notices that she’s not alone. On her travels she meets a man Greyhounding home from prison, an Apache helicopter pilot, a close friend with severe bipolar disorder — and nobody’s trauma is uniquely unfair, least of all hers. Instead, the stories of hardship ebb and flow like the beats she learns to mix as an amateur DJ.

As for her own tumult, nowhere does she suggest that her many jobs — from Subway “sandwich artist” to Blockbuster video clerk to dishwasher to medical office administrator to AI-bot trainer to singing-bowl seller to adjunct college instructor — are not good enough for her in particular, or that she, by dint of effort and intelligence, is too good to fulfill their duties. “Although I hadn’t thought I’d grow up to be a housecleaner,” she writes off her time tidying a backpackers’ hostel, “I found I relished the work, especially its quiet, meditative moments . . . stripping sheets, washing dishes, dusting, turning lights on or dimming them for mood, scrubbing toilets, or, my favorite, watering plants.”

Paar is not surprised by life’s sharp edges. For her, losing loved ones to guns, drugs, suicide, and mental illness is so tragic in part because it’s so mundane. Nevertheless, she refuses to be bored by the world. On the contrary, each new environment is worthy of meticulous, often awed description: the “secret sandstone bluffs” of Pacific City, the “wild synesthesia” and “muted thuds” of the Flagstaff EDM scene, and the “dark, coniferous, spiked shadows” of a bungalow-lined neighborhood in Portland. Paar knows how easy it is for people to vanish from the planet, and she loves the planet and its people harder for that fact.

Refreshingly, romantic prospects don’t dominate Paar’s narrative so much as punctuate it like commas in a long, sinuous sentence. Men come and go, and eventually she marries one without much fanfare. “Tim’s on his way home from a music tour,” she squeezes into a short section of an essay dedicated to recounting the decline of an indigent friend, “then we’re doing something unconventionally conventional: getting hitched.” In the essay “Murder City,” Paar and her husband move to St Louis. She spends less time reflecting on the new marriage than on the fact that, in St Louis, “swaths of burned-out, blighted houses exist mere blocks from the city’s stateliest mansion, whose owners spend more on lawn care than their neighbors live on annually.”

The sheer volume and variety of jobs Paar takes on is a testament to the thin line separating “blue-collar” from “white-collar” when a college degree doesn’t count for as much, when the cost of living climbs steeper than annual salaries. In St Louis, she appears poised to make her final escape as she pursues a coveted MFA at a tony program. In time, though, it becomes clear that no amount of cultural capital will guarantee financial solvency. “After rent and utilities are paid, the student loan bills land in the mailbox at our pretty brick home in the tough neighborhood and my heart sinks,” she laments. “It grows weary of skirting failure, grows thin like a filament, or paper fragments prone to scatter.” After twenty-five years of hustle and multiple degrees, middle-class status is as far away as the backyard stars of childhood.

Paar’s work has what many other class memoirs lack: a kind of gentle fatalism about the potential for individual transcendence of social structures. At the same time, she doesn’t suggest that every aspect of our lives is constrained by circumstance — only the broadest contours. Within those contours is a kind of freedom of movement, made possible by the art of “escah-pay.”

The epilogue of The Exit Is the Entrance is set at a county jail where Paar leads a writing workshop. “We agreed how it’s possible to write the endings of our stories far away from where they started,” she reflects, “characters baby-stepping toward better.”