Conversations Between Friends: Tom McAllister and Aaron Burch
Tom McAllister’s It All Felt Impossible is exactly what its subtitle promises: “42 Years in 42 Essays.” Of course, what makes it literary; what makes it a hypnotic, engaging, magical read; what makes it one of my favorite books of recent memory, is that it is exactly that and also so much more.
I’ve known Tom—mostly online, though in person here and there, too—for something like fifteen years and part of the joy of this book was that Tom was able to so perfectly capture himself on the page while also revealing and showing me more than I’d ever known. Reading it made me feel like I’d learned so much about him, but also so much about myself, about writing, about the world. I started our chat by turning that back on Tom, asking what he’d learned about himself, about writing, about the writing, and then we went from there.
—Aaron Burch
Aaron Burch: Tom! Maybe this is obnoxious (and maybe you’ve already been asked versions of this a lot; and I know, to various extents, the book itself is already thinking about and sometimes even answering these questions), but I’d love to jump right in and start with the big picture. To some degree because I know you, and so am just curious; and to some degree, I think the book encourages this curiosity; and to another degree, maybe this is just where I’m at with my semester, but I found myself curious what you “learned” while writing this book. And, specifically, I’m curious about this question, in three parts: a) about yourself? b) about the world of life in general? And c) about writing?
Tom McAllister: You’re actually the first one to ask this question (all three parts). One thing I learned about myself is that my life is kind of boring, but also I’m okay with it. Which is to say, even though some bigger things happen in this book (tornadoes, monorail crashes, weddings, funerals, etc.), a lot of it is focused on these smaller moments in a relatively quiet life. That wasn’t the plan, but when you sit down and start taking stock, sometimes you realize that the most interesting things you have to say are about the little things, the routines. Walking dogs, teaching freshman comp, commuting to work, and so on. It was a fun challenge (this is leading into part three to think about how to write about routine and relatively mundane experiences in a way that is still engaging and complicated. I didn’t think this consciously while drafting, but I do think it’s important for us not to just document the spectacular; one of the things art can do is enliven those days when it seems like very little is happening. I skipped part two. Short answer: the practice of writing these pieces made me more appreciative of many aspects of being alive. As you know, my friends consider me to be a bit of a crank; thinking more deeply and seriously about my own life forced me to appreciate all it’s offered, even the difficult parts.
AB: It’s funny, I think writing (probably specifically nonfiction, although fiction, too, in its ways) has made me think my life is more interesting than I’d thought or realized. But some of that comes from the same place—focusing on smaller moments, homing in on the little things. It’s so much of what I encourage in the classroom, and I bet you do, too? In “1985,” you write, “In pushing a student to grope clumsily toward a new understanding of the world, I feel like I’m doing something worthwhile,” and, to me, that so often, and kind of counterintuitively and certainly in opposition to their impulses, happens through little things. Students often worry that their lives aren’t interesting enough, not enough has happened to them yet, to write essays, but we focus on finding those little things, the routines, the mundane experiences, and then trying to be engaging and complicated in thinking and writing about them.
Grabbing hold of those ideas of “engaging and complicated”… I think a big part of what I’m connecting to with the book is all the ways it is thinking about and using nostalgia. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think I clock you as someone who would define or think of himself as especially nostalgic, although the very nature of the book maybe contradicts that presumption. I’m incredibly nostalgic—it is perhaps the primary theme in my writing—but I think in ways I’m always trying to be engaging and complicated. When “nostalgia” gets a bad rap, I think it is because it can be so simplistic—one note, empty, too rosy, “remembering” the past in ways that aren’t actually true. But I like this idea that “thinking more deeply and seriously about my own life forced me to appreciate all it’s offered.”
This is a long, incredibly rambly way of asking you to talk about nostalgia?
TM: I agree you’re a nostalgia fan (not derogatory), and in fact I introduced you exactly that way in this episode of Book Fight!. You’re right, though, that I typically wouldn’t think of myself or present myself that way. But this is an example, I think, of how you discover things about yourself when writing a memoir, and crucially, in the importance of following those discoveries wherever they lead you. It’s such a common challenge in drafts, where an essay is suggesting you go some place—whether your subconscious is putting it on the page or the facts are just all pointing in one direction—but you might need a push to actually go there. In this case, I had to push myself to embrace a specific kind of nostalgia in pretty much every essay that predates my thirties.
Last semester, I had the privilege of teaching a personal essay class in the MFA program at Rutgers-Camden, where our students are just so talented and thoughtful and engaged, and really force me to raise my game. It was not something I planned, but a lot of our discussions ended up centering on nostalgia, specifically the question of: how do you know when you’re being dishonest in the nostalgia? At its worst, it’s an impulse that essentially becomes propaganda—you’re writing dishonest stories about a past that never really existed (unfortunately, many such examples these days). But there’s a ton of value and material in digging into these moments when you have some fond memory and want to excavate why you even remember it at all, let alone whether you remember it correctly or why it might be worth writing about. It’s a tough balance. The absolute last thing I want to do is lie—to myself, to my readers—about what the past was. But also it’s nice to remember getting in fights with people online about Nine Inch Nails. I guess the point is I’m getting old.
AB: That’s such a big part of it! Not lying to the reader, not lying to ourselves. Digging in and wondering why we even remember something, why it affected us, why it might be worth writing about.
I think the book is great—in lots of ways, and on its own terms—but at least a part of the joy of reading it for me was seeing it touch on these aspects of you that I know, and then also other aspects that surprised me. You mentioned Book Fight!, and there’s a fun little line early in the book, in “1984”—“it’s possible that 1984 is the book that the most people pretend to have read”—that felt almost like an Easter egg, because “What’s a book you’ve pretended to read?” is a question in your guys’ lightning round for every guest.
Re: “you discover things about yourself when writing a memoir, and crucially, in the importance of following those discoveries wherever they lead you,” the book isn’t out yet, but I bet a bunch of friends have read it, and a number of the chapters were previously published… I wonder if you’ve heard any responses—from friends? family? LauraBeth?—of discoveries or surprises about you?
TM: Oh wow, now I’m wondering which parts of it were surprises to you! I think among people who have known me since college or earlier, the biggest surprise was that I’m capable of being sentimental; when I was younger, I was so much angrier, for no good reason, and anyone who knew me back then is still surprised when they witness all the various ways I’ve gone soft. Of course you have the inverse too: people who have only known me professionally or within the last ten years or so, shocked to learn that I was once the kind of guy who would get in a fist fight over being called Walter (my legal first name) or, worse, being called a “poser” for not liking Metallica in precisely the right way.
My brother, who is almost six years older than me and appears in the book more than most other family members, has been surprised by all these little moments I was living parallel to him; because of our age gap, we had a long stretch where we saw each other often enough but didn’t really know each other. So even in the moments where our experiences overlapped in my childhood—like going to WWF’s SummerSlam in 1990—we were noticing and feeling completely different things about it. I will say, he hasn’t yet read the essay that specifically talks about how I wish I had a better relationship with his college-aged kids, and they obviously haven’t either, and I’m semi-anxious about what they’ll say about that one.
AB: Ha! Yeah, Nothing specific, and maybe “surprise” is too big a word for it, but it’s just been interesting—and I’ve really enjoyed!—feeling like I’m being let in a little.
In your “Author’s Note” you mention starting with a handful of rules, including “Write in order, chronologically,” which you broke almost immediately. That makes sense—letting yourself write whatever was calling to you, and I imagine some would lead to ideas for others, even when not chronologically next or explicitly related.
Were there any you felt like you “put off” or kind of avoided, either because you didn’t have any ideas or maybe had too many and couldn’t decide or just the idea/year maybe felt too hard? Relatedly: were there any that, for whatever reason, were especially hard/harder than others?
TM: I initially put off some of the earliest years, for reasons you can probably guess. I didn’t know how to enter an essay about the year I turned one, and I didn’t want to just Google “important events 1983” or something like that. So I held off on some of those years until I could get over to my mom’s house and dig through old photo albums and other documents (thankfully, my mom has never thrown a single thing out) and try to trigger some meaningful memories. I could have forced ’83 or ’85 or some of those other years, but I wanted to feel like I was saying something that actually was relevant to me then (and now).
There were some later years I put off for different reasons. I got married in 2007, and I assumed that year would be easy to write, but I couldn’t find a way into it that felt interesting. My wife appears all over the book, but something about describing the wedding itself felt too obvious and kind of boring. I tried a lot of different options on that one before finally ending up where I did (an essay that mentions my wedding but is about an entirely unrelated topic). I found it much easier to get into the in-between years without the major milestones than I expected. This is why, when I sometimes assign a task like this to my own students, I urge them not to pick the most obvious year—college students often want to write about high school graduation or prom or something—and instead pick a year where they won’t feel so boxed in by the Big Event.
AB: I like that! It is definitely something I push my students toward as well, and something I found myself gravitating toward in my own essays, even echoing your language here in the title of my own short essay collection, A Kind of In-Between.
A couple final questions:
I’m curious whether you have written any additional/“alternate” mini essays about any years? Because you had another idea, or you got locked into this conceit and just wanted to do it again, even if you already had one done for that year? And, the book ends with 2024. Have you written an essay for 2025? If not, do you think you will? Is it an idea you think you’ll keep up, or does the book feel like it “completed” the project and now you’re done with it?
TM: I do think I’ll write one for 2025. The way the publishing process for this went, I wrote the first thirty-seven essays (up through 2019) all at roughly the same time. Then my (former) agent said she didn’t think she could sell the book, and I spent a couple years individually submitting the essays all over the place. For a while, I thought that was probably the end of the project, and I felt pretty good about it. It was cool to have this catalogue of my life scattered all over the internet. But when Rose Metal Press opened for submissions in 2023, a friend bullied me into submitting to them. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to return to the project, but I figured why not try writing four new essays and see if there’s still any life to it. As soon as I started, I felt the same exact excitement for the project that I did back when I started. We ended up adding a 2024 essay to keep it as up to date as reasonably possible before pub day, and again I was locked in. I feel like I’ve discovered the value of journaling, finally. It’s a fun artistic challenge to try to identify something worth writing about for each year, and to do so in a way that isn’t redundant or boring.
Not ducking the first part of the question. I have a ton of false starts that got halfway finished on some years, where I was trying to make a particular incident work and just couldn’t figure it out. The only one that is pretty close to complete and doesn’t appear anywhere in the book is an alternate 1989 in which I’ve stolen my brother’s cassette tape of Appetite for Destruction and am going crazy for it even though I don’t understand anything the songs are about (let alone the insane album art!), and on the bus ride home from school one day, I write the word “fuck” in the condensation on the window, which gets me in so much trouble. I still enjoy that as an anecdote, but no matter how I tried to tie it together, I couldn’t figure out how to say anything besides, “Hey, remember that?”
AB: And, finally, for the last couple of years, I’ve started every interview I’ve done with an author by asking where the piece initially came from, what the seeds of the idea were, if they could tell me a little about the genesis for this piece. You basically answer that in your “Author’s Note,” and so I’m now actually a little curious about writing that. Was that something you wanted to do and add as context, or something the publisher encouraged? What was it like reflecting on a project, not just in interviews like this one, but as an actual introduction to the book itself?
TM: That was a requirement for Rose Metal Press. They do so many weird hybrid things that it’s become a standard part of their presentation. Lots of their books have strict constraints and rules and particular influences; mine is actually one of the least experimental/most straightforward things they’ve published. I enjoyed writing it, though, and I hope people note that it’s under fifteen hundred words too. It was a good chance to articulate not just the basic rules of the book (chronology, word counts, process) but also to shout out a couple of the craft influences. On a sentence level, I was really trying to do my best to imitate Denis Johnson and Alejandro Zambra, who are both geniuses at making associative leaps in time and place. I didn’t mention her in the introduction, but I was also thinking of Elisa Gabbert, who is one of our best living writers, and, when I asked her for a blurb, I told her that I had her in mind as my ideal reader. Basically, if Elisa would like it, then it means I did my job.
So far, I’m still enjoying reflecting! I’ve done a few interviews, and everyone has asked such disparate questions. I guess that’s one of the good perks of a book that touches on so many subjects and incidents; readers will connect to totally different chapters. Another fun thing that’s been happening at my early events is people immediately launching into the year they would write about first if they did this, and why. I love how infectious the project has been. I hope everyone tries their own versions of it.
AARON BURCH is the author of the essay collection, A Kind of In-Between, and the novel, Year of the Buffalo, among others. He is the editor of Short Story, Long, and co-editor of HAD. His next book, TACOMA, will be out in February 2026 from Autofocus Books. Find him on Instagram @aaron__burch.
TOM McALLISTER is the author of two novels, including How to Be Safe, and two books of nonfiction, including the essay collection It All Felt Impossible, published by Rose Metal Press in May 2025. His shorter work has been published in The New York Times, Epoch, The Sun, Cincinnati Review, and many other places. He teaches in the MFA program at Rutgers–Camden and is nonfiction editor at Barrelhouse Magazine.
