Since 2010, in various publications, I’ve interviewed authors—mostly memoirists—about aspects of writing and publishing. Initially I did this for my own edification, as someone who was struggling to find the courage and support to write and publish my memoir. I’m still curious about other authors’ experiences, and I know many of you are, too. So, inspired by the popularity of The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire, I’ve launched The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire.
Here’s the 104th installment, featuring Tom McAllister, author most recently of It All Felt Impossible: 42 Essays in 42 Years. -Sari Botton
P.S. Check out all the interviews in The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire series.
Tom McAllister is the author of the forthcoming memoir-in-essays It All Felt Impossible: 42 Essays in 42 Years (Rose Metal Press, May 2025). He is also the author of the novel How to Be Safe, which was named one of the best books of 2018 by Kirkus and The Washington Post. His other books are the novel The Young Widower’s Handbook, the memoir Bury Me in My Jersey. His short stories and essays have been published in The Sun, Best American Nonrequired Reading, Epoch, Black Warrior Review, and many other places. He is the nonfiction editor at Barrelhouse and co-hosts the Book Fight! podcast. He lives in New Jersey and teaches in the MFA Program at Rutgers-Camden. Visit his website here.
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How old are you, and for how long have you been writing?
I’m 42 as I am typing this answer, but will probably turn 43 before this Q & A gets posted, which I realize doesn’t make a huge difference to any readers here, though it is relevant to my newest book, in which I wrote an essay for every year of my life. We had to cut it off somewhere, so we went for 42. Which means I am currently living the only year of my life not to be documented anywhere.
I started writing as a hobby when I was young; I was a good student, and I liked being told I was very good and smart, and so when I got praise for my writing, I kept doing it. I wrote very bad short stories and even a play (about Dinosaurs, mostly stomping around and saying stuff like “ROAR! He bit me!”), and eventually I ended up declaring a journalism major in college. I figured I would become a sports writer; that was my only ambition. I didn’t care for my journalism courses, though, and I took a fiction workshop with Justin Cronin, who had just won the PEN/Hemingway award and was an excellent teacher.
More importantly, I saw him and thought: I want that guy’s life. I didn’t even know MFA programs existed until he told me about his time in Iowa. That was in 2002. That’s around when I understood what kind of writer I thought I wanted to be.
What’s the title of your latest book, and when was it published?
It All Felt Impossible: 42 Essays in 42 Years, referenced above, published by Rose Metal Press in May 2025.
What number book is this for you?
This is my fourth book. Though I got my MFA in fiction and did not think of myself at all as a nonfiction writer (my grad program had, and I believe still has, a very strange firewall between the nonfiction writers and the fiction writers, a very antagonistic relationship), my first published work was a short essay, which grew into my memoir Bury Me in My Jersey. The middle two books were novels, published in 2017 & 2018. After that, I felt a little burned out on fiction and turned to writing short essays again; ultimately that writing grew into this book.
How do you categorize your book—as a memoir, memoir-in-essays, essay collection, creative nonfiction, graphic memoir, autofiction—and why?
Memoir in essays, though I wouldn’t be upset if anyone called it an essay collection. The book does not attempt to be remotely comprehensive, but there’s a clear through line on my life, with recurring characters (my wife, my mom, my older brother) and all the complications one would expect from memoir.
What is the “elevator pitch” for your book?
In It All Felt Impossible I’ve written a short essay for every year of my life. Each piece is strictly limited to a maximum of 1,500 words, so that the essays move fluidly through time, taking poetic leaps and ending up in places the reader does not expect. The goal is to tell the story of my life through brief glimpses, anecdotes, and fragments that radiate outward and grapple with my place in the culture at large. It’s an effort, too, to capture the meaning and beauty in the mundane, the smaller moments of one’s life than accumulate and make you who you are.
I’m 42 as I am typing this answer, but will probably turn 43 before this Q & A gets posted, which I realize doesn’t make a huge difference to any readers here, though it is relevant to my newest book, in which I wrote an essay for every year of my life. We had to cut it off somewhere, so we went for 42. Which means I am currently living the only year of my life not to be documented anywhere.
What’s the back story of this book including your origin story as a writer? How did you become a writer, and how did this book come to be?
I started writing this book out of desperation. My two novels were published by different presses within a 13-month span, and during that time, I was producing a ton of promotional content, a style of writing that does not come naturally to me and that also became quite draining. It felt like I spent two years writing things I didn’t care about, with no tangible benefit (it’s hard to say if those promotional essays lead to sales or not, but even if they do, you don’t know it for sure).
I started this project specifically because I wanted a break from fiction, but also because I wanted to produce something that was (initially) just for me. Not to share with publicists or to pitch anywhere. To rediscover the parts of writing I enjoyed. By giving myself the constraints of essay length and the yearly focus, I was able to produce completed drafts of individual pieces quickly. I gave myself homework, basically. But that homework led to words on the page, which created its own momentum. Soon enough, I felt like I had something worth working on. I was excited about writing again. I finished the first draft of all 37 (at the time) essays in about 2 months. Then it took a while of honing, editing, submitting, adding years, and so on until we ended up here.
What were the hardest aspects of writing this book and getting it published?
I was with a big fancy agent when I finished the book, but it was pretty obviously going to be a small press book the whole time. I don’t begrudge my agent not wanting to spent nine months pitching a book so that she could get 10% of very little money, but that meant I put it on the back burner for a while. She gave me the okay to submit the individual pieces to lit mags, which I did for the next 18 months or so (submitting 37 pieces at once all over the place, at one time I had over 280 active submissions—my spreadsheet was a mess).
For a while, I thought it was cool to have them all published in different places, a fragmented memoir that people could piece together if they wanted to track it all down. But in 2023, a friend encouraged me to shape up the manuscript, write a few new essays, and submit it to the open call from Rose Metal Press. As someone who lives in the small press world, I have known and respected RMP for a long time, so I decided why not give it a shot? I’m very fortunate they liked what they saw.
In It All Felt Impossible I’ve written a short essay for every year of my life. Each piece is strictly limited to a maximum of 1,500 words, so that the essays move fluidly through time, taking poetic leaps and ending up in places the reader does not expect. The goal is to tell the story of my life through brief glimpses, anecdotes, and fragments that radiate outward and grapple with my place in the culture at large. It’s an effort, too, to capture the meaning and beauty in the mundane, the smaller moments of one’s life than accumulate and make you who you are.
How did you handle writing about real people in your life? Did you use real or changed names and identifying details? Did you run passages or the whole book by people who appear in the narrative? Did you make changes they requested?
I’m not sure my wife especially loves how often she comes up in these essays, though it’s important to note that she always is portrayed in a very positive light (anyone who knows the two of us as a couple knows she is the better person, that in many ways both concrete and abstract she has saved me from what would have been a very bad life path). Still, she’s a private person. I let her read everything, but she never asks me to remove a line. Now and then she corrects a detail, but she has made a certain kind of peace with the fact that this is one way I pass my time. I do use her actual name because typing “my wife” 1000 times in a manuscript makes you seem like an insane person. And a pseudonym there feels silly since anyone who knows or cares about us knows her name anyway.
Though people like my brother, my mom, and my in-laws appear throughout the book, none of the essays are about them, so I don’t feel any particular anxiety about including them. What I mean is, I’m not criticizing them or sharing their private stories; they are populating the world, and I try to honor them by writing as truthfully and generously as possible. I do discuss a few friends from the past in less flattering terms, and in those cases I changed names. I theoretically could have shown them what I’ve written, but I wouldn’t change it anyway, so it feels like a performance with no benefit.
In general, I tell my students that if they’re worried they’re being unfair to someone, a) it means they probably are, and b) they need to be willing to share that with the person in advance. And they need to know, going into this conversation, how much editorial control they’re willing to cede to the person reading it. You can show it as a courtesy, but you need to be clear at the start whether you’re actually going to make any changes they request (and if they’re important people in your life, you should at least be willing to consider these changes).
Who is another writer you took inspiration from in producing this book? Was it a specific book, or their whole body of work? (Can be more than one writer or book.)
Two fiction writers: Denis Johnon and Alejandro Zambra. Both geniuses at moving fluidly through time, at making sudden moves in time and place that don’t feel jarring or arbitrary. Both so skilled at writing stories that feel meandering an unstructured, but in fact are tightly constructed. I had been rereading Largesse of the Sea Maiden (Johnson’s final, brilliant book) and My Documents (Zambra) while I was working on this book and their style was infectious. On a craft level, my primary goal in the book was to try to pull off the same tricks they did.
What advice would you give to aspiring writers looking to publish a book like yours, who are maybe afraid, or intimidated by the process?
When I talk to students about this topic, I tell them the only thing you can control is the quality of the work you’re doing. There are so many variables that complicate the publishing process—even something as simple as an editor or agent reading your book on a day when they’re in a good mood—that you can make yourself crazy thinking about them. But nobody can stop you from making the work as good and right as possible, as close to your vision as possible.
When the student invariably expresses some frustration at that response, I also say: do a ton of research. Make sure you’re sending your manuscript to the right places, to people and institutions that will respect your work. Make sure you’re demanding your dignity as a writer the whole time. The rejection stings, the process can be frustrating, but if you keep producing good work, it will find a home.
What do you love about writing?
The thing I love most is when I’m reading a draft of something for the 5th or 6th time and I run into a line that still surprises me or makes me laugh. It’s a simple thing, but when that happens, I first of all feel good about myself for writing something entertaining, but also I think: wow, maybe you’re not crazy to do this. The capacity to surprise yourself, even when you know all your own tricks—that makes life worth living.
What frustrates you about writing?
When I have a brilliant, earth-shaking idea that’s going to revolutionize the world of letters, and then I write it down and it’s actually very stupid and bad. Happens more often than one might think.
I tell my students that if they’re worried they’re being unfair to someone, a) it means they probably are, and b) they need to be willing to share that with the person in advance. And they need to know, going into this conversation, how much editorial control they’re willing to cede to the person reading it. You can show it as a courtesy, but you need to be clear at the start whether you’re actually going to make any changes they request (and if they’re important people in your life, you should at least be willing to consider these changes).
What about writing surprises you?
That moment in every successful piece—whether it’s a flash fiction or a long essay or a full book—when suddenly, sometimes in the middle of a sentence, you just unlock what the piece is supposed to be. You start with whatever idea, and grind at it, getting more and more frustrated, and when you get lucky, your subconscious just solves the problem for you. The puzzle pieces all fit together. Every time I start a new project, it feels hopeless all over again, until it doesn’t.
Does your writing practice involve any kind of routine, or writing at specific times?
I wish! I mean, I could make that happen. And periodically I do. But I’m an inconsistent writer. When I have a project on which I’m really locked in, I will typically write in the morning (after walking my dog) for a few hours, and call it a day. I’m a fast writer, so I can produce 2000-4000 words in a morning relatively easily. The editing takes longer—I tend to go through 6 or 7 rounds of revision (alternating between editing on screen, on printed pages, and reading aloud) in a pretty regimented way.
What’s next for you? Do you have another book planned, or in the works?
I have a novel on submission with a number of small presses right now. It’s been a bit of a long haul there, and I have not had luck finding a new agent with it, though I think it has a pretty marketable premise. It’s my attempt to write the first ever book in my life that could be described as “fun.” While that’s out there, I’m early in the stages of trying to outline a historical novel, something I’ve never tried before (neither the historical part nor the outlining part) set in Camden County, New Jersey, where I live.
This is so wonderful. And it's making me buy the book. And that's why this whole series is so wonderful. It's not only fortifying for anyone contemplating writing a memoir (guilty!), but it also introduces wonderful authors and books you'd never hear of otherwise.
Sari, in ALL your enterprises you are doing great services, filling aching gaps we didn't know were there—about aging, writing, sobriety—living.
Just chiming in to thank Sari for the interview and to thank Tom (and Mike) for so many years of Book Fight. They’re winding it down now after 14 years and leaving a great body of reviews.