- Publisher : All En Crafts LLC Press
- Language : English
- Print length : 135 pages
- Reading age : 12+
- Available as:
Hard Cover
Paper Cover
Becoming Ordinary
A Memoir of an Ordinary Life
What if an ordinary life isn’t something to escape—but something to arrive at?
In Becoming Ordinary, James Allen reflects on a life shaped not by headlines or heroics, but by workbenches and radios, small towns and long roads, family stories and quiet reckonings. Told through a mix of prose, poetry, personal reflection, and a few family stories that simply demanded to be included—including the memorable tale of his mother’s unexpected “POW experience”—the book traces the moments that form a life when no one is keeping score.
From childhood memories and working years to love and loss, faith questioned and reshaped, and the perspective that comes only with time, these pieces move between the thoughtful and the humorous. They are stories about showing up, paying attention, and finding meaning in places that don’t announce themselves: a kitchen table, a high-school band room, a hospital hallway, or a shoreline at dusk.
Along the way, Allen explores work and worth, resilience and renewal, family and memory, and the connections between people, places, and moments that quietly hold a life together.
This is not a memoir of becoming famous, successful, or extraordinary.
It’s a memoir of becoming present.
Honest, reflective, sometimes funny, and deliberately ordinary, Becoming Ordinary invites readers to slow down, notice more, and perhaps recognize pieces of their own lives in the spaces between the stories.
The Origin of Becoming Ordinary
The spark for Becoming Ordinary was fear.
On my father’s side of the family, Alzheimer’s has shown me that memory cannot always be counted on to remain. On my mother’s side, early deaths have been a reminder that time itself cannot be counted on either.
That combination made me think seriously about legacy. I wanted to put these memories, stories, thoughts, and pieces of family history somewhere permanent while I was still here to tell them—and, just as importantly, while I was still me.
I wasn’t trying to prove that I had lived an extraordinary life. Quite the opposite. I wanted to preserve an ordinary one: the family stories, work, mistakes, humor, relationships, beliefs, questions, poems, and seemingly insignificant moments that become a life when you put them all together.
Becoming Ordinary grew from the realization that someday I may not be here to tell these stories—or I may no longer remember how to tell them.
So I decided to tell them now.