The Possible Impossible

It All Felt Impossible—42 Years in 42 Essays

by Tom McAllister

Rose Metal Press, 2025

reviewed by Seana Graham

When a former student of his asked for advice on how to get over writer’s block, Tom McAllister replied that, among other things, sometimes it helps to give yourself a set of constraints. Finding himself in a bit of a slump, he decided to follow his own advice and set himself a challenge. He would write an essay a day that could be only 1500 words long and preferably less, and he would write an essay for every year of his life thus far. There were other parameters, some of which he broke over time, but this was the gist of it. McAllister discovered that his first essay (“1998”) ended up in a completely different place than he’d expected and he felt a renewed excitement about writing.

You might expect a prescriptive laying out of the years to be a tedious autobiographical grind, but in the very first essay of the book (“1982”) McAllister frees himself from the limitation of writing only about that particular year (which, after all, he doesn’t remember) to mention a writer he’s found in a Best American Short Stories of that year who only has that one small claim to fame. This leads him to reflect on his own writing life and successes so far and what any of it means, and how different any achievement looks from the vantage point of time.

Each reader will have their own favorite essays, but here are a couple of passages from my current ones. In “1989,” at his seventh birthday party, young Tom was in a restroom alone with soap covered hands and trying in vain to turn the handle of the exit door, which led to a full-blown panic attack. A stranger let him out, and he went back to his family without reporting what had occurred. They hadn’t noticed he was missing.

My personal history is littered with these moments—of intense despair, certainty regarding my doom—that turned out to be harmless, exaggerated. The more time I spend writing about my youth, the more I realize how much of my story is one of irrational panics. Moments of self-inflicted hysterics that dictate choices I make for the rest of my life. The gradual boxing in of my possibilities due to fears I have invented whole cloth.

He then describes an early biking accident that kept him from riding a bike again. (But, spoiler alert, “2023,” the penultimate essay of the book, sees him taking up the challenge as an adult.)

In a similar vein, and from a similar time— “1987”—McAllister describes a vivid, terrifying memory of falling, only to reveal that it couldn’t possibly have happened. He then goes on to describe a few other events that still seem real to him but can’t be.

I can try all I want to be as truthful as possible, but I have no way to verify most of the information I’m sharing. They are events I remember having occurred, and that I can describe in great detail. Still, I need to acknowledge that it’s possible that some (most?) of the stories I’ve told to friends over the years have been invented, in whole or part. What I really want to know is: can fears, if felt deeply and intensely enough, generate these experiences in our minds? What is the difference between me having actually fallen and me feeling absolutely certain that I have fallen?

Other readers will find other themes to be of particular interest. He explores many memories of his family, of the different eras of his life so far, of his happy marriage with his wife, of animals he has loved. At the end of a discussion of the Iraq war—“2003”—McAllister reveals a little of what he’s trying to accomplish in these pieces, even as he admits that sometimes it’s impossible to make things turn out neatly.

There’s this writing move I feel like I’m expected to do here, at the end of an essay, where I add some flourishes and assign meaning or reveal hidden beauty in the events I’m describing, but sometimes there is no meaning, and the only beauty or ugliness is what’s on the surface. What am I supposed to tell you? That everything got better? Come on.

Another winner from Rose Metal Press!

Seana Graham is the book review editor at Escape Into Life. She has also reviewed for the biography website Simply Charly. She attempts to keep up with her various blogs, including Confessions of Ignorance, where she tries to learn a little bit more about the many things she does not know. She has published stories in a variety of literary journals. The recent anthology Annihilation Radiation  from Storgy Press, includes one of them. Santa Cruz Noir, a title from Akashic Press, features a story of hers about the city in which she currently resides. 

Get It All Felt Impossible at Rose Metal Press

Chicago Review of Books interview with Tom McCallister