Nothing Will Be Different: A Memoir

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

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

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

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

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