Solace in Shrinking the World: A Review of Tom McAllister’s It All Felt Impossible By Jenny Recktenwald
With Tom McAllister's new release from Rose Metal Press, It All Felt Impossible: 42 Years in 42 Essays, the writer has crafted a reflective and deeply personal collection, offering one essay for each year of his life from 1982 to 2024. Author of the novels How to Be Safe and The Young Widower’s Handbook, and the memoir Bury Me in My Jersey, McAllister is the nonfiction editor at Barrelhouse and teaches writing at Rutgers University-Camden. His work appears in Issue 9 of Miracle Monocle.
The essays in this collection are built from brief but resonant glimpses of McAllister’s past—anecdotes and fragments that ripple outward, reflecting his evolving relationship with the people and the world around him. Equal parts humorous, self-deprecating, and wistful, It All Felt Impossible invites readers into a mind at once observational and introspective. McAllister’s voice is candid and at times meandering as he revisits moments of joy, regret, loss, and self-discovery. “Writing these essays, I’m finding some solace in shrinking the world around me and fortifying myself,” he muses. “I am trying to order my life in such a way that I can validate my existence.”
The essays traverse an expansive emotional and thematic landscape: growing up Catholic, confronting personal failures, falling in love and getting married, choosing to remain childless, grappling with sobriety, mourning lost parents, and reckoning with political and social upheavals. He examines his life with a blend of sentimentality and cynicism—reminiscing about the past while acknowledging its darker undercurrents. There’s a tinge of ambivalence in his recollections, a tension between longing for simpler times and recognizing the uncomfortable truths that lurked within them. “Does the fear create the memory or does the memory create the fear?” he writes. “This country is sick with nostalgia for a forgotten, lost America, but most of the features people love about that America never existed in the first place.”
McAllister has a gift for extracting the profound from the mundane. He recalls a gathering after a storm where neighbors shared food by candlelight, a brief but powerful experience that felt like “the urgency of people living their last night on Earth.” These small moments capture both the simple and the remarkable in everyday life.
McAllister also grapples with the racism that surrounded his upbringing, confronting the environment he grew up in with stark clarity: “Casual racism was part of the atmosphere. Groups of men sat in circles and unhinged their jaws and let all the world’s garbage spew out onto the floor, and then invited their kids to play in it.” But his reflections manifest as observations rather than true reckoning. This distance, while honest, makes it feel like some of the toughest truths are left unexplored.
Later chapters tackle aging head on, as McAllister reflects on the shifting desires and priorities that accompany each stage of life. He distills this evolution with candor: “When you’re young you want wealth and when you’re old you want health and in the middle you convince yourself that what you deserve is happiness, even if it’s not what you have.” McAllister shows how time changes our goals, making us accept—sometimes reluctantly—that youth is about chasing dreams, adulthood is about compromise, and middle age and beyond are about seeking peace. But McAllister doesn’t fall into simple nostalgia. Instead, he faces the complexities of aging and understands that no stage of life brings easy satisfaction.
The book’s structure—four decades condensed into snapshots—sometimes feels rushed. Some essays are lyrical and contemplative, while others are too neatly wrapped up, especially when tackling weighty subjects like grief or political unrest. Still, McAllister’s storytelling immerses readers in his quirky, messy world, where he witnesses a monorail crash, serves cheesesteaks in college, survives a tornado, and learns to ride a bike in his forties.
Readers who enjoyed Beth Ann Fennelly’s Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs (W. W. Norton & Company, 2018) or Isaac Fitzgerald’s Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022) will appreciate McAllister's unfussy, confessional approach to memoir—prioritizing substance over sophistication.
It All Felt Impossible captures the beauty and absurdity of a life fully lived—its chaos, its heartbreak, its unexpected joys. McAllister looks at even the smallest moments with care and honesty, giving them meaning. His essays remind us that while we may not always understand the forces shaping our lives, we can find comfort in reflection, humor, and sharing our stories.
Tom McAllister’s It All Felt Impossible is available for pre-order from Rose Metal Press, forthcoming May 14, 2025.