Tara McGowan-Ross

In this memoir-in-essays, a neurotic party girl scrambles to rationalize life as she knows it after finding a lump in her breast. 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 an angry determination, she attacks each issue in her life as the days creep by, and winds up writing a searingly honest coming-of-age memoir about learning to live before getting ready to die.

Nothing Will Be Different

Disordered eating. Tear gas. Coked-out sex. This is life during a student strike. Girth is an uncomfortably honest poetic account of a woman's body, suspended between reflection, action, and self-destruction.

Girth

In this narrative in verse, a failed academic with a dead-end domestic labour job disappears into her own consciousness in an attempt to distance herself from her circumstances. Up against poverty and political tyranny that seems to worsen by the day, she finds solace in substance abuse and destructive relationships. But as the boundaries between fantasy, reality, her past, and her present start to break down, she's left to figure out what in her life is within her control and what is simply written in the stars. A meditation on grief, pleasure, free will, and totalitarianism, Scorpion Season is an experimental and genre-bending book of poetry about a strange time to be alive.

Scorpion Season

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.

A Memoir

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

Tara McGowan-Ross

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