Tara McGowan-Ross reflects on the messiness of her 20s in memoir Nothing Will Be Different
Nothing Will Be Different is a finalist for the $60,000 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction
Montreal-based Mi'kmaw writer, editor and artist Tara McGowan-Ross says she was just trying to write "an easy-read hot-girl memoir" when "all of this stuff about Nietzsche and the economy crept in."
Her memoir Nothing Will Be Different chronicles much of her 20s — from the highs and lows of making rent, the bad relationships with good people and the many ways a person examines their body, their partners, their late nights and their childhood in a bid to make peace.
Nothing Will Be Different is one of five books shortlisted for the 2022 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction. The $60,000 prize is the biggest in Canadian nonfiction. The winner will be announced on Nov. 2, 2022.
McGowan-Ross spoke to CBC Books about writing Nothing Will Be Different.
What inspired you to write a memoir?
I thought I was dying. The inciting incident of the book is that I'm doing a self-breast exam. I assume it's nothing and then I go to the doctor and the doctor is not sure it's nothing.
My mother died of breast cancer when I was very young so I didn't handle the information normally.
It triggered a lot of self-reflection. The neuroses of that — which is in the book — is very much reflective of what I was going through when I had this opportunity to pitch a book. There's this [idea] that we write what we have and that's what I had at the time.
There are time jumps throughout the book. How did you negotiate what parts of your life went into the memoir and what you left out?
When you're writing about your real life, you're negotiating your duties to your art, your duties to yourself and then my duties to the people who are still in my life. What does the story require of my relationship to them?
That was a difficult decision of what gets put in, even though it might cause conflict, and what gets taken out, because it might not be worth the conflict that it's going to cause. It wasn't an easy process. I think that's why I went through so many drafts.
What the art kept requesting of me was this very full human presentation of my self and also of other people who kept arriving in the art.
When it came to the way other people arrived in the book — even when I started writing, I was like, "Okay, so obviously these are the villains, these are the bad guys. Then I would start writing and be like, "That doesn't feel right."
Then I was like, "Okay, well instead I'm the villain." I tried to write myself as the villain and other people as the good guys, and that wasn't true either.
What the art kept requesting of me was this very full human presentation of myself and also of other people who kept arriving in the art.
There is a lot of empathy in the way you write about past relationships. I was struck by one section where you describe a sexual experience with someone and how that experience changed in your mind over time. What made you want to include those changes in perspective?
Simone de Beauvoir talks about how the things that we do are never dead. We are never finished with anything. The things that we do throughout our life re-emerge over and over again and they should because if we let them be dead, we turn them into objects and that's not how stuff works.
Our projects, our passions, our relationships or our beliefs are these living things that change and re-emerge over and over again.
Our projects, our passions, our relationships or our beliefs are these living things that change and re-emerge over and over again.
That particular relationship, which is basically a one-night stand with this one person, had a bunch of weight to it because I ended up hospitalized and — I don't want to necessarily call it traumatic, it was just very intense.
At the time, I didn't even understand what went wrong. That was the first layer of it. I was like, "Okay, it's just bad sex."
Then, a little while later, I needed anger to be able to figure out how to have boundaries. I needed to access boundaries and be assertive, especially in relationships with men. Anger was my door into [boundaries].
Anger was maybe an appropriate door but it wasn't an appropriate place to live and stay. This person was just a person and he was just doing his best but his best and my best didn't interact well with each other. It took me a long time to figure out what that meant.
I think it's just a matter of the fact that I was 19 when the experience first happened. Then I was in my early 20s when my understanding flipped again. Then I was in my mid-to-late 20s when my understanding of this relationship flipped for a third time.
It's a very dramatic example of ways that I have reflected on lots of different interactions in my life and how I felt about people, things and experiences that I've had.
What do you hope readers take away from Nothing Will Be Different?
I honestly hope they have fun. I mostly wrote the book trying to have a good time.
If there's anything else, it's that the moment that death starts feeling really close, there's something really magical to it. It's not as scary as I thought.
I honestly hope they have fun. I mostly wrote the book trying to have a good time.
When I felt death come into my peripheral vision, I started making a whole bunch of choices as though my life was really important.
We are all going to die. That's not a rallying cry to grind hard and get a lot of success. What do you want to do with it? Do you want to lie in the grass? Do you want to call your mom? Do you want to show up at your ex-boyfriend's house and tell him you want him back? You should probably do that instead of going on LinkedIn.
Not be a LinkedIn hater but whenever I go on there, I'm like: Do you know we are all going to die?
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
