Inventive, funny, and deeply moving, this is a family epic unlike any other: part love story, part elegy, part reminder that even in the mess of family and memory, there is something to laugh about
There is no meant to be, but the love I’ve known has made it hard to believe that.
Jarred McGinnis was born to a Southern US clan where masculinity, resilience and physical violence were intertwined. In There Is No Meant to Be he unearths the legends, secrets and scars that have shaped his family line from his outlaw Irish ancestors through to his mother Momo’s gift of foresight, and the ghosts – both real and remembered – that follow him into adulthood.
Two decades later, having survived a catastrophic accident that left him in a wheelchair, McGinnis is married and the father of two girls, living first in East London and now Marseille. He writes about love within the context of care and of the particular vulnerability that comes from being a parent with a disability. In a daring imaginative leap, Jarred writes of the end of life too, reaching beyond his own death to look at what truly makes a life.
Beautifully accesses the space(s) between novel and memoir, between masculinity and humanhood. It’s a long time since I’ve read anything so raw and intimate, so daring and disobedient.
Sarah Hall
Astonishing, so funny and clever – the most beautiful and truthful song to the pain present in a good life.
