More than anything, Pauly's Mother is about the importance of mothers in our lives. When Pauly is six years old, his mother dies unexpectedly. This changes everything about the way he, his older brother Danny and his father, Dan, live. They struggle for the next four years until Dan senior remarries. Then Pauly has to forge a new relationship with Nora who becomes his second mother. Told in the first person, present tense from the point of view of Pauly as a child, Pauly's Mother is a mostly nonfiction autobiography. It is a sad, moving and sometimes humorous story about Paul's tragedy and his recovery. It is set against a background of being raised Irish Catholic on the South Side of Chicago during the 1950's. It is also a wonderful, hopefilled, upbeat story about coming of age during a more innocent era. After being downsized in 2001, Paul James McAllister decided to start writing. In 2003 Paul's poem, That Far Australian Beach, won Third Place in an online poetry contest sponsored by Beginnings Publishing. In 2007 Paul entered a short story, The Ties That Bind, in the 76th Annual Writer's Digest Writing Competition. He was awarded an Honorable Mention in the Genre Short Story category. Over 19,000 people entered the competition that year. He started writing Pauly's Mother in the fall of 2005 while taking an online Memoir Writing class from Writer's Digest magazine. He finished his work six years later, in November of 2011. Pauly's Mother is the author's first published work. Paul James McAllister currently lives in Blue Island, Illinois, not far from where he grew up.
