There Is No Meant To Be: Family, Identity & Legacy

In his ground breaking memoir, Jarred McGinnis tells a family epic unlike any other. Tracing a life shaped by abuse, a near-fatal accident, and fatherhood as a disabled parent, he joins Sarah Hall for a candid conversation about masculinity, family, caregiving, legacy, and love.

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 to his mother, Momo’s gift of foresight, and the ghosts – both real and remembered – that follow him into adulthood.

Two decades on from the near-fatal 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, he writes of the end of life too, reaching beyond his own death to look at what truly makes a life.

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.

‘It’s a long time since I’ve read anything so raw and intimate, so daring and disobedient. I was left feeling certain that if anyone is capable of playing the ace in a hand of cards against The Fates, it’s Jarred McGinnis’ Sarah Hall

‘Astonishing, so funny and clever – the most beautiful and truthful song to the pain present in a good life’ Evie Wyld

Jarred McGinnis is the co-founder of The Special Relationship, which was chosen for the British Council’s International Literature Showcase. His short fiction has been commissioned for BBC Radio 4 and appeared in literary journals in the UK, Ireland, Canada and US.

He is an associate writer for Spread the Word, a fellow of the London Library Emerging Writers Programme and a writer-in-residence for First Story. He also has a PhD in Artificial Intelligence, but mostly he inspires the able-bodied by using public transport and taking his daughters to the playground. His debut novel, The Coward, was a BBC Two Between the Covers book club pick and won the Prix du premier roman étranger in France.