“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.