Reviewed by Emily Webber
In Tom McAllister’s collection, It All Felt Impossible: 42 Years in 42 Essays, he challenges himself to write an essay for every year of his life. There’s a danger this could come across as forced and feel like a response to a writing exercise. Yet, McAllister pulls off something wonderful, connecting ordinary life moments to the larger political and cultural perspectives of the time he’s writing about. Each essay is its own micro-memoir, but reading the entire collection becomes a meditation on childhood experiences, aging, and how a person changes (or doesn’t) over time.
In one essay, McAllister admits he tries to make more out of things to have something to talk and write about. Something he warns his students against doing:
“I tell my students all the time that memoir has nothing to do with major incidents, that it’s about keen insights and vivid details and so on, but I’m always the last one to listen to my own advice.”
Yet, he does take his own advice. These essays are grounded in the specific, everyday details of life. McAllister’s desire to be honest about his motivations and flaws, often at his own expense, makes it easy for a reader to relate to him regardless of gender or age.
The beginning essays focus on childhood and family relationships and teenage angst. He rages against the toxic nature of youth sports, how violence is glorified among boys, and the complicated relationships among kids and first romantic relationships. Describing growing up so accurately: “All I wanted then was to fundamentally change myself, but nothing I tried worked. I was changing all the time, but it was all out of my control.” Including the universal feeling of not taking certain events seriously when young and regretting it later. In the 1995 essay, he describes a letter his dad wrote him:
“I know when I was 13 I rolled my eyes at that letter, and I never envisioned this version of me, 25 years later, fatherless for most of them, finding it and trying not to cry in front of my wife, trying to turn it into a joke, somehow.”
McAllister doesn’t shy away from how teenagers can be casually racist and cruel and develop bad habits that haunt them later in life. As I read these early essays, I thought about my eight-year-old son making his way through an imperfect world and the impact of outside influences. Since my son was born, I’ve been collecting books for him that I hope he will read when he’s older—books that have brought me a greater understanding of myself and the world, or simply the thrill of reading something delightful. It All Felt Impossible will be added to that list. To tell my son what McAllister shows: it is impossible to be perfect; you will make mistakes and do stupid things, but you can’t let it make you blind to the good in yourself and the world.
While I mostly saw my son in the early essays, I saw myself in the other half, not just because I am roughly the same age as McAllister, but because of how he writes about aging.
“The choices you make when you’re a teenager matter in a way you cannot possibly imagine, no matter how often adults warn you about it. You can pretend not to understand the math, but it all adds up, with or without your permission.”
He shows both how aging presents itself in his body: “You do stupid things and 20 years later your body lives with the consequences, the aching knees and the creaky neck and damaged heart…The ghosts live inside your bad bones.” And the different ways he wrestles with trying to quit habits he knows are unhealthy: “I am typing this and thinking about going down to have a beer. It’s Thursday. I have just finished the first week of a new semester. Without a drink the night is long and dull. With a drink, at least you can look forward to the next drink.”
Even though there’s a lot to complain about because life can be hard or boring or not what we expect, there are also moments of joy and growth throughout the essays. In one of my favorites, McAllister recounts how, as an adult, he signed up for classes to learn how to ride a bike.
“Last summer, I found a free course in Philly for adults who wanted to learn how to ride bikes. The incident that finally pushed me over the edge was when my eight-year-old niece was riding circles around me, baffled by my inability to do the same. She asked why I’m afraid to do something so easy. I was afraid—of falling, sure, but mostly of looking foolish.”
McAllister easily could have brushed this off, but he followed through on the class. The essay is funny and full of insightful observations. It’s a testament to the fact that we never need to be done learning or going out and experiencing the world in new ways.
Reading It All Felt Impossible: 42 Years in 42 Essays recalled the thrill of discovering Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights years ago. McAllister may have fewer bits of joy to deliver, but he gives the reader 42 years where he looks directly within himself to show the flaws, heartbreaks, chaos, and beauty that make us human.
Emily Webber is a reader of all the things hiding out in South Florida with her husband and son. A writer of criticism, fiction, and nonfiction, her work has appeared in the Ploughshares blog, The Writer, Five Points, The Rumpus, Necessary Fiction, and elsewhere. She’s the author of a chapbook of flash fiction, Macerated.
