Nothing Will Be Different - by Tara McGowan-Ross (Paperback)

About the Book

Tara McGowan-Ross, an infamous Montreal party girl, discovers a lump in her breast, which sends her on a tumultuous journey of rigorous self-questioning. This coming-of-age memoir weaves together a hilarious and heartbreaking story about learning to live before getting ready to die.

Book Synopsis

Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction 2022 -- Shortlisted

A neurotic party girl's coming-of-age memoir about learning to live before getting ready to die.

Tara has it pretty good: a nice job, a writing career, a forgiving boyfriend. She should be happy. Yet Tara can't stay sober. She's terrible at monogamy. Even her psychiatrist grows sick of her and stops returning her calls. She spends most of her time putting out social fires, barely pulling things off, and feeling sick and tired.

Then, in the autumn following her twenty-seventh birthday, an abnormal lump discovered in her left breast serves as the catalyst for a journey of rigorous self-questioning. Waiting on a diagnosis, she begins an intellectual assessment of her life, desperate to justify a short existence full of dumb choices. Armed with her philosophy degree and angry determination, she attacks each issue in her life as the days creep by and winds up writing a searingly honest memoir about learning to live before getting ready to die.

A RARE MACHINES BOOK

Review Quotes

Tara McGowan-Ross is an unpretentious poet and philosopher weaving together meaning from the pain, grief, heartache, as well as simple joy of being alive. Nothing Will Be Different is a meditation on amor fati: the love of fate, the love of what is. By being with all of it: trauma, profound loss, the reality of death, addiction, precarity, the gig economy, hard work, love both dizzying and secure, sex, and insatiable desire, Tara shows us that transformation comes not through a battle against what is, but from the willingness to be changed by it.-- "Clementine Morrigan, author of Love Without Emergency"

Tara McGowan-Ross unravels history and present in raw, unflinching prose that is at once funny, heartbreaking, and lyrical. A coming-of-age reflection that is searing in its honesty, energy, and depth, McGowan-Ross treads difficult topics such as death, loss, addiction, and grief with wryness, wit, and depth.-- "juror comments for Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize"

The memoir is honest and raw, but also deeply funny in its portrayal of grief, mental illness and addiction.-- "Maisonneuve Magazine"

This book is a must read if you want to know what it's like growing up Millennial and urban in Canada (it follows her from Toronto, to Halifax, to the tree planting cut-blocks of British Columbia and to Montreal where McGowan-Ross now lives).

--Rita Leistner

This delightful book, appropriately enough, works like your favourite mixtape. It's got everything you want, and somehow it all fits. The arrangement is unexpected but, in retrospect, seems obviously right. Here is softness and pain, intimacy and revulsion, flourishing and sickness. And McGowan-Ross just sounds so good.-- "Sasha Chapin, author of All The Wrong Moves"

About the Author

Tara McGowan-Ross is an urban Mi'kmaw multidisciplinary artist and writer. She is the host of Drawn & Quarterly's Indigenous Literatures Book Club, a critic of experimental and independent Montreal theatre, and an editor for Insomniac Press. She is the author of Girth and Scorpion Season. Tara lives in Montreal.