42 Years in 42 Essays, by Tom McAllister – Compulsive Reader

Reviewed by Jaclyn Youhana Garver

It All Felt Impossible: 42 Years in 42 Essays
by Tom McAllister
Rose Metal Press
May 2025, 184 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1941628355

People like to equate having written a book to having had a kid. They like to call books “babies,” perhaps because it takes years, sometime decades, between the start of a book’s creation and the finished, bound product. Admittedly, all the work for a book comes at the front end, and then after it exists, it kind of takes on a life of its own; and the majority of the work for a kid, however, comes firmly after it cooks.

I hate this analogy. I don’t have kids for many, many reasons, and if you say “It’s like your baby!” about anything I’ve written, I’m working to keep my face from curling into an expression of “ew, no.”

I say all that to apologize for what I’m about to say: Tom McAllister’s It All Felt Impossible is not unlike a kid. As a fellow childfree-by-choice Millennial, I can only guess that he would take umbrage at this simile, but, Tom, hear me out. I’m not comparing the two processes of creation—writing and crafting with baby-making and -rearing—but the resulting book itself.

It All Felt Impossible is a collection of 42 memoir-style essays, one for each year of McAllister’s life. Essay No. 1: 1982. Essay No. 42: 2024. In the author’s introduction (reader, if you’re the type to skip intros, I implore you not to miss this one; the context it adds to Impossible is, if not required, then at least vital), McAllister shares the general guidelines he followed for these stories, including ensuring the essays max out at 1,500 words and writing each essay in a single sitting, daily.

If he followed his own guidelines, I’m led to believe he crafted the first draft of Impossible in 42 days. Less than a month and a half. Which makes me feel like I have a solid understanding of the collection’s title.

All this means we meet McAllister in his infancy. We follow him through childhood, into his teen and college years. Through his twenties, where he tries his damnedest to make sense of it all. Through his thirties where he gets a clue and finds a bit of self-contentment. He leaves us firmly in his early forties, receding hairline (but never too old to learn a new trick) and all.

He grows before us, literally, like a child, on the page. And peppered throughout are the major themes of the book, lessons he’s pulled from various stages of his life, and sometimes retroactively:

1983, 1 year old: “Now, like everyone else, I am addicted to my phone; I spend all day mashing the screen to demand that it deliver me more sad and infuriating and unhealthy content … I feel, at times, more distant from the real world than I ever have. Every child absorbs the atmosphere in which they live. Don’t ask me to explain the science … I’m just trying to talk about how things feel.” (page 6)

1998, 16 years old: “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.” (page 64)

2004, 22 years old: “As I get older, I feel the distance between myself and the rest of my family more acutely. I try writing about it because if I arrange the words in the right order, maybe I can summon into existence the world I prefer.” (page 86)

2021, 39 years old: “I can get cynical about liberal do-gooderism that feels mostly symbolic … But to work together with a couple dozen other people and make a good day happen? … To feel useful? I don’t doubt the value of any of that. You can’t let yourself become too jaded to even try.” (page 150)

We read for any number of reasons: to learn, to be entertained, to feel less alone. There’s something special about finding within a book ourselves, to see pieces of us reflected back to us on a page; there’s something special, too, about getting a peek into a world that feels far removed from our every day, about an escape that teaches us something about someone fully unlike ourselves. For me, Impossible bridged this line between selfishness and empathy, between the joy at shared experience and the curiosity at learning about someone who’s nothing like I am.

McAllister was born one year before me. His news and pop culture references are my news and pop culture references (hello The Simpsons [page 1], the explosive popularity of DNA kits [page 17], the death of the video rental store [page 28], the in-good-faith-but-ultimately-degrading declaration of “bros before hoes” [page 65]). But there is a more important similarity: a hesitant hope for good that lurks behind the bushes in the midst of what has felt like a lifetime of tragedy after tragedy. It’s nearly a clichéd phrase now, but that doesn’t remove any of its truth—I’m sick of living in unprecedented times. Bring on the precedented times.

But McAllister also details experiences and feelings that are foreign to me, from the mostly insubstantial (striving for mediocrity in Catholic grade school while I was a Catholic grade-school suck up, partying hard in college while I was so boring that I didn’t drink til I was legal) to the wildly substantial: Throughout Impossible, McAllister insists he is a homebody, that he struggles with self-confidence. Even when this begins to turn around—in his mid-30s, which “were the happiest and healthiest period of my life so far”—he punctuates the revelatory Things Are Getting Better! epiphany with “I almost never feel bad about being alive” (page 116). This is a mindset I struggle to understand, and I appreciate the peek into McAllister’s “why” and “how.”

Impossible is the story of an elder Millennial man trying to understand himself and his place in the word. He’s at once cynical and hopeful, dubious and loving. This collection—this, I hate to say, baby that McAllister produced (Tom, I’m so sorry)—is at once an attempt to chronical and make sense of the last four decades and an apology for doing so. Consider one of the more notable occurrences of this concern, from 2013, when McAllister is 31 years old: The essay tells of a party at home with his wife’s family. She realized there was no OJ for the mimosas, so he left the party for a couple minutes to buy juice—and no one noticed he’d left.

“It’s not that I needed them to be waiting at the door with balloons and firecrackers. But I wondered how long I would have had to be gone before someone noticed … It’s best not to think about some things for too long.” (page 120)

Impossible is an insistence that McAllister not only came to the party, but he made it better.

About the reviewer: Jaclyn Youhana Garver is the author of the novel Then, Again (Lake Union Publishing) and co-editor of Requiem for a Siren: Women Poets of the Pulps (From Beyond Press). Her writing has appeared in The Oakland Review, Poets Reading the News, Cincinnati Magazine, and Lifehacker.com, among others. She is on the board of directors for the Midwest Writers Workshop.