SmokeLong Quarterly

Reviewed by Vincent Anioke

Tom McAllister’s It All Felt Impossible: 42 Years in 42 Essays [Rose Metal Press, May 2025] has a simple, compelling format: 42 essays spanning chronological musings from all 42 years of his life. You start in 1982 when he was a tiny, toothless thing and go all the way to 2024 where toothlessness still matters, albeit metaphorically. Each flash essay is about four pages on average, a modest-sized real estate that consistently delivers depth and humor. Reading McAllister conjured a passage from the opening pages of Helen Lee’s equally absorbing Pomegranate: “There was a whole world, strange and crazy-beautiful, underneath the skin. Layer on crooked layer of ruby crystals. And chambers, like inside a heart.” It All Felt Impossible is a kaleidoscope of fleeting, cascading layers from McAllister’s life. Elements recur: his love of dogs, relationships gained and lost, adolescent mistakes, the anxieties associated with having crystalline self-awareness, a world in political and geographical disarray, his wife LauraBeth. McAllister also writes moments that are unique to the year in which they appear: a childhood freakout in a locked bathroom, a wedding spoiled by alcoholic antics, the drafting of a 600-page novel that no publisher would ever touch. The overall effect proves propulsive, each essay simulating life’s resistance to predictability, the desire to unearth what the future holds.

Following McAllister’s path often jolted me. Sometimes, it was a twist in the tale: a neighbor he co-sheltered with during a tornado turned out – months later ­– to be an abuser. Mostly though, these are quiet essays, observing the peculiarities of daily living, the little shocks often coming from the depth of McAllister’s vulnerability. You get to know him quite well. He’s romantic, for instance. The very first chapter, when he was one, marvels at the serendipity of his wife being born that same year: “She was a baby too, and babies only are allowed to know the people their parents or guardians introduce them to. We wouldn’t meet for another 18 years, but is there any more important development in my life? Her birth is the event that shapes everything that follows.” He’s also staunchly aromantic, often resisting the instinct to deify our memories, to force an unearned depth onto them, to bring forth a Grand Lesson. McAllister presents his adolescent failures with a matter-of-fact baldness: a girlfriend he treated badly, how he laughed at the racist jokes friends made – however uncomfortably, and the blackouts and small dramas from too much drinking. His examination of life over the years feels earnest, which in turn gifts us with repeated poignancy.

In particular, McAllister is skilled at pulling the resonant from the mundane. He recounts having to drive an old TV to a county dump, which doesn’t stink like you might expect. The TV joins a special pile for rotting electronics: “it would outlive me by a million years, and that whole time it would be utterly useless, just plastic and wires, there forever.” Or take the wrestling game he watched as a kid, burned in his memory. It’s a natural segue from there to the state of the wrestlers years later – dead or dying, ruined by the vices that come with celebrity, or by their own repugnant beliefs. When McAllister ruminates on the decay of our heroes, I too reflected on the people that raised me virtually and the ways some have fallen.

The soft pain of what is lost swirls through Impossible, our powerlessness against forces both personal and cosmic. Political woes and climate change rise alongside the bodies that grow cold. A rescue dog conquers her anxiety in spurts, filling McAllister with ecstasy. Later, she dies, as all things will. Weddings, he observes, are often the last time you see used-to-be-close friends. Our social circles are ever-dwindling. James, a childhood buddy, gets lost to far-right ideology. McAllister notes that if they ever met again, the present gulf would be too large – all they’d have are stories of old, nostalgia for a stranger. Nostalgia is rarely enough. Sometimes, though, McAllister shows that it is all we have. In the aftermath of the tornado where he co-sheltered with a neighbor turned abuser, he went to a friend’s house. The power was out, so many gathered in that backyard with food from their refrigerators. They feasted. McAllister describes it thus: “We swelled with the urgency of people living their last night on Earth. On one side of the tornado had been grad school and on the other side was the rest of my life, as if it had picked us all up in a single swipe and plopped us all down into some better place. Within a month, I would be gone and I would never speak to most of these people again. For one night, we were all still there. We told the stories of our sheltering experience over and over. I was upstairs and then I was downstairs. It was quiet and then it was so loud. Afterward, I was fine. It all felt impossible.” Where then, you often wonder, does possibility lie?

In McAllister’s collection, you will find gun ranges and teenage rage and wry humor and Blockbuster before the internet and crashed monorails and cancer and all manner of bad behavior. You will find the poignant in the mundane, and reflect on your own assorted years, and feel an ache for the fleeting, the chaotic, the things that tower above us. Guided by McAllister’s tender treatment, you will also find what keeps us moving, what makes it all possible. The moments of quiet joy, of romance, of possibility: McAllister excavates them too, and lays them bare at our feet. They may not always glitter, but they linger.

Tom McAllister’s flash essay collection It All Felt Impossible is available for pre-order from Rose Metal Press, forthcoming May 14, 2025.

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Vincent Anioke is a Nigerian-Canadian writer and software engineer. His short stories have appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, The Rumpus, The Masters Review, and Passages North, among others. He won the 2021 Austin Clarke Fiction Prize and was a finalist for both the 2023 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award and the 2021 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Perfect Little Angels, his debut short story collection, was released in 2024 and shortlisted for the Dayne Ogilvie Prize. He is currently working on a novel.