Dec 1st, 2025
Tom McAllister’s It All Felt Impossible is an unassuming, quietly profound book of essays that traces a life through the simplest possible structure: one piece for each year of the author’s life, starting in 1982.
That premise may sound a little simplistic, but McAllister turns it into something tender and revealing. Rather than simply ticking off milestones, like his first job, first heartbreak, marriage, career, he reaches into the hidden corners of memory and mixes in all the “life” that happens on the peripheries.
His great strength is his ability to tell a story through minuscule moments, like the childhood memory of standing in a restaurant bathroom, hands soapy, panicking because he couldn’t open the bathroom door to rejoin his friends. It’s a small moment, but it shows how fear grows bigger than it should, and how embarrassment can shape the experience of youth.
McAllister’s insights become clearer as he gets older in the essays. The book avoids nostalgia, especially the kind promoted by people who long for a 1950s America. He eviscerates their myth-making with a single sentence: “Their fury is a fear of losing something they never had in the first place.”
McAllister’s own boyhood and adolescence were hardly idyllic. He writes of the arrogant certainty of his 15-year-old self: “I’ve tried to bury that arrogant, narrow-minded version of me, but some days I want to resurrect him. I want to cling to that defiance and that confidence. It never felt good exactly, but it felt like a direction.” The honesty in that admission makes the essay feel like a mirror—every adult reader remembers some misguided version of themselves, a past self they would both apologize for and defend.
His teenage years provide some of the book’s revealing moments. McAllister acknowledges the cruelty and smallness of adolescent boys, recounting how he and his friends treated girlfriends as an inconvenience, “resenting girlfriends for interrupting their routines and insisting on being included. And then doing everything to make them feel excluded.” The bluntness of that confession is disarming. So too is his recollection of heartbreak: “Getting dumped and then seething for six months.”
The essays about young adulthood explore the slow erosion of friendships. McAllister notes the natural death of male friendships after marriage, not through bitterness but simple acknowledgement. He also jokes about the excess of wedding culture: “I don’t know any married couples who wish they’d spent more time or money on their wedding, but everyone keeps doing it.” This isn’t casual; it points to the odd gap between what society expects and the real work of living with another person.
Loss, too, is treated with frankness. When he confronts the death of a friend who had spiraled into addiction, McAllister refuses to soften the edges: “Most stories don’t end gracefully, no matter how much we try to convince ourselves they will.”
By his thirties, the essays turn inward, toward self-doubt and comparison. At 30, he admits, “I forget too often how much good there is in my life, because I’m so focused on finding new ways to complain about everything I don’t have.”
Later, he struggles with the slow feeling of becoming irrelevant: “You don’t really have a choice in whether you become obsolete or not, but I think there’s some dignity in acknowledging it.” The book’s later chapters are not hopeless, however. He writes with a gentler maturity about growth: “To think that even as you get older, you can still learn.” It is a statement of optimism, reinforced by another line: “It’s still possible to grow and change.”
The final essays meditate on aging, both his and that of his loved ones. When his mother casually discusses all the people in her church who have had body parts replaced, he recognizes a new phase of life: “If we’re lucky, we will live to an age where this is the main mode of conversation.” The remark is funny, sad, and grateful all at once, like much of the book.
It All Felt Impossible succeeds as a collection of essays not because McAllister has lived an extraordinary life, but because he insists that ordinary lives are worth recording.
Buy the book at Barnes & Noble, Amazon, or indie bookstores.
Review by Cetywa Powell