by Writing Workshops Staff
2 days ago
This month, HuffPost published Allyson Noman’s personal essay “I Was Preparing To Divorce My Husband When He Died. Afterward, We Could Finally Talk Again.”
It is an account of losing a husband to complications of alcoholism and the unfinished conversation that grief keeps open afterward. What makes it remarkable is its refusal of easy shape. There is no redemption arc, no villain, no tidy grace note at the end—only a writer holding two irreconcilable truths at once and declining to resolve them for the reader’s comfort. That restraint is the hardest thing to do on the page, and she does it without appearing to strain.
The Writer Behind It
Allyson is a first-generation Pakistani-Korean writer and visual artist, born in Oakland and raised in the Bay Area. She earned her BA in Creative Writing and Book Arts from UC Santa Barbara’s College of Creative Studies before moving to New York City, where a decade in hospitality carried her to Miami Beach.
She now lives in northern California, and her work explores identity, love, and addiction. An essay on wine, memory, and time appeared on JancisRobinson.com, turning a cellar of unopened bottles into a reckoning with everything that will not now happen. Stories and essays are forthcoming from The Common and Forbes Wine, and her short story “Laila” has been nominated for the 2027 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers.
Her work has received support from the Tin House Workshops (now the McCormack Writing Center), the Northern California Writers’ Retreat, the Napa Valley Writers Conference, and the Wine Writers Symposium, where she was a 2024 fellow, among others. She spent a week with us at Writing Workshops Paris in September 2023, one stop on a long road she was already well down.
And Now, a Novel
Allyson has completed her debut novel, Fly by Night, a coming-of-age story set in the booming late-aughts restaurant scene of New York City. It draws on the years she spent inside that world—the hours, the noise, the particular intimacy of people who work nights together—and she is currently querying for representation.
That is the stretch of the writing life that asks the most and promises the least. Anyone who has read her sentences will not be surprised by where it lands. You can follow her work at allysonnoman.com.
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