Boyhood, By Accident: How Time Became the Co-Author of the Calvin Cycle

There is a question readers sometimes ask, usually after finishing A Pleasant Fiction: How long did all of this take to write?

It’s an innocent question, but it misses the larger truth. These books did not simply take a long time; they were written by different versions of the same person. The Calvin cycle is not a single project stretched across decades. It is a series of encounters between a character and the changing consciousness of the writer who kept aging around him. In that sense, the entire duology resembles Richard Linklater’s Boyhood—not because I set out to mimic his experiment, but because life replicated it on the page without my permission.

Becoming Calvin was written in the late 1990s, in the quiet, electric period after my wedding. I was newly married and certain that adulthood would clarify itself in short order, the way a room sharpens when the lights come on. The early chapters carry that young man’s metabolism—his confidence, his ambition, his need to understand himself in motion. If there is a kind of sweetness to the prose, it is because I had not yet lost the people who taught me to love. If there is bravado, it is because I still believed that identity was something you could sculpt out of desire and momentum.

The next sections—Growing Pains and The Age of Unbecoming—were written several years later, in 2004–2006, just before I became a father. Those books live in the hinge-space between recklessness and responsibility. They are written by someone who senses that life is about to become permanent, but does not yet understand what permanence demands. Fatherhood was on the horizon, close enough to change the light but not close enough to explain it. These books are marked by a subtle anxiety: the feeling that the path you set yourself on as a young adult is beginning to harden, and that your future self will have to answer for choices your younger self made casually.

Calvin, too, stands on that threshold. He does not yet see the consequences forming behind him, but the reader can. The writer could feel them, even if he didn’t yet have the vocabulary to name them.

And then there is A Pleasant Fiction. Written in 2024, after the deaths of both my parents and my brother, it is a book from a different country—one separated by a border you can only cross through grief. I was fifty-one when I wrote it, old enough to understand that memory does not behave chronologically, and that love is easiest to see in retrospect. The book’s nonlinear structure reflects the way loss dislocates time: a single recollection can collapse decades, and grief can make a forty-year-old memory feel urgent in the present tense.

Nothing in A Pleasant Fiction could have been written by the version of me who wrote Becoming Calvin. Nor could the young man who was newly married have anticipated the emotional topography of middle age—the responsibilities, the absences, the funerals, the silences that follow. A Pleasant Fiction is not a book written with craft alone; it is written by someone who has lived through the dismantling of the world he once assumed was permanent.

This is where the comparison to Boyhood comes in—not as a gimmick but as a structural truth. Linklater’s film works because he let the camera record the actual passage of time: the actors age, their bodies change, their voices deepen, their eyes tell different truths. You cannot imitate that with makeup or digital effects. Time is not an aesthetic; it is a presence.

Unintentionally, the Calvin duology does something similar. The early chapters carry the momentum of a man in his twenties. The middle sections are written by someone bracing for adulthood’s permanence. The final book is shaped by someone who has buried the people who raised him. You do not need to know the biography to feel these shifts—they are embedded in the sentences, the pacing, the concerns of each narrative moment.

What emerged, without plan or design, is a longitudinal portrait of consciousness: a character who ages because the writer aged, a worldview that widens because the writer lived long enough to understand what had once confused him. Calvin does not simply grow up in these books; he grows up with me, sometimes against me, sometimes ahead of me.

Literature often compresses decades of emotional experience into the narrow window of a single creative period. That is its magic. But the Calvin books do the opposite: they expand across the real decades of a life. Each phase contains what that particular version of me understood—and more importantly, what he didn’t understand. Readers sometimes notice the stylistic evolution, the shifts in tone, the way the moral and emotional questions deepen. They are not reading a refinement of craft; they are reading the sediment of time.

This is why the project matters to me in a way I never expected. It is not simply a coming-of-age story or a meditation on grief. It is a record of the self as it changed—first in hope, then in anticipation, then in mourning, then in something more spacious and honest than either optimism or despair.

Boyhood was filmed across twelve years. The Calvin cycle was written across twenty-six. One was intentional; one accidental. But both are documents of what happens when time becomes a collaborator.

If there is a single thread connecting these books—one that may not be visible on a first read but becomes undeniable on reflection—it is this: you cannot write middle age when you are young, and you cannot write youth when you are grieving. Each era has its own clarity and its own blindness. Each voice can only speak from where it stands.

In that sense, Calvin is not simply a character. He is a conversation partner I kept meeting at different stages of my life. He is the echo that allowed me to hear what time had done to me.

And perhaps that is the final function of these books, the quiet one beneath the narrative arcs and the grief and the memory: they show a life not as it was planned, but as it unfolded. They show how understanding accumulates. How loss reorders meaning. How a young man’s bravado becomes a father’s humility becomes a middle-aged man’s clarity.

That is the project I did not intend to create. Time wrote it with me anyway.

Javier

© 2025 Chapelle Dorée Publishing, LLC. All rights reserved. This content may not be reproduced, distributed, or modified without permission.

Thanks, Kevin, PART III — What Randall and Calvin Both Realize at the End

In the first installment of this Kevin Smith appreciation trilogy, I drew parallels between Calvin in The Wake of Expectations (especially Becoming Calvin and Growing Pains) and Dante in Clerks. In Part 2, the comparison shifted to The Age of Unbecoming and Clerks II.

Now, in Part 3, comes the deepest parallel of all: the way Clerks III reframes the entire Clerks universe in much the same way that A Pleasant Fiction reframes The Wake of Expectations. Both works are told by older storytellers looking back, reinterpreting the lives they once chronicled through younger eyes, and finally saying aloud what they couldn’t have understood the first time.

Randall’s Revelation

At the end of Clerks III, Randall finally sees the truth: He thinks he’s been making a movie about himself—his frustrations, his worldview, his profane philosophy of life behind the counter.

But the film is really about them.
About him and Dante.
About every dumb argument, every rolled eye, every quiet act of loyalty that made the grind bearable.

His revelation carries emotional force because of the biographical truth beneath it. Kevin Smith wrote an entirely different version of Clerks III years before—but he rewrote the film after the heart attack. After the night he nearly died in the parking lot of a comedy club. After the moment he was forced to confront the meaning of his own life.

Surviving changed his perspective.
And the story changed with him.

Dante had always been the younger Kevin’s avatar—anxious, aspirational, working through the tensions of becoming an adult. But post-heart-attack Kevin couldn’t speak through Dante anymore.

He saw himself in Randall.

The abrasive wildcard he once imagined himself to be had matured into someone else: a man trying to understand the life he’d almost lost. So the point of view shifts—not as a narrative trick, but as a biographical necessity.

The older Kevin needed a different narrator.

Calvin’s Version of the Same Truth

By the end of A Pleasant Fiction, Calvin reaches a parallel destination—but his shift is vertical, not lateral. He doesn’t move from one character to another; he moves from the younger self who lived the experiences to the older self who survived the aftermath.

If The Wake of Expectations is narrated by a young man still trying to become someone—chasing an imagined ideal of himself and his relationships—then A Pleasant Fiction is narrated by the version of Calvin forged by the deaths of the people who defined him.

Not a man imagining who he might become, but a man uncovering who he actually was.

The deaths of his parents, his brother, and his friend did not just alter his circumstances; they altered his consciousness. His memories became archaeological. His desires became contextual. His reflections became communal rather than individual.

He realizes his story was never his alone.
It belonged to everyone who helped shape it—those he loved, those he lost, those he misunderstood, and those who misunderstood him in return.

Where Randall learns his story was always shared, Calvin learns that identity itself is a collaboration. A mosaic of inherited angles, borrowed emotions, and mirrored experiences.

He doesn’t lose himself in this realization.
He simply stops mistaking himself as a solo act.

What Film Suggests, Fiction Can Inhabit

Film can reveal connection through a glance, a cut, a shared silence.
But prose can inhabit that connection. It can spiral through memory, double back on itself, linger in the contradictions that define us.

Clerks III gives us Randall’s revelation in the moment it occurs.
A Pleasant Fiction lets us live inside Calvin’s internal echo as the understanding unfolds over chapters, griefs, and pages of reflection.

Cinema captures the spark.
Fiction sustains the burn.

Life Doesn’t Stay in One Genre—So the Story Can’t Either

Here is another parallel that reveals itself only when looking at the long arc rather than isolated works: the tonal evolution mirrors the emotional evolution.

The early stories—Clerks, Becoming Calvin, Growing Pains—are comedies of youth: chaotic, profane, absurd. Arguments that feel existentially important because youth hasn’t yet revealed what actually is.

Then comes the middle movement.
Clerks II and The Age of Unbecoming expose the grief of outgrowing the selves we once hoped to become. These are comedic works, yes, but the humor sits beside earnestness, regret, and recognition.

And finally, the last movement:
Clerks III and A Pleasant Fiction—works that place humor beside mortality, loss beside sarcasm, grief beside wit. Not to soften the edges, but to tell the truth.

Because life doesn’t honor genre boundaries.
It never has.

Humor persists even in grief.
Grief deepens humor.
The people we miss most were often the same people who made us laugh hardest.

A long life produces a long story, and a long story cannot stay in one register.

The Collective Self

When Calvin accepts that his story was never his alone, he’s not relinquishing individuality. He’s finally acknowledging that identity is porous—shaped by every relationship, every misunderstanding, every inherited gesture or borrowed belief.

Randall memorializes Dante through film.
Calvin memorializes everyone through language.

Both acts say:
Look how much of me belongs to you.

The Perspective That Death Demands

This is the core parallel between Clerks III and A Pleasant Fiction: both works were shaped by storytellers who had stood face-to-face with death—one directly, one relationally—and emerged unable to tell their stories the old way.

After that kind of confrontation, you don’t return to your earlier voice.
You don’t return to a younger narrator.
You cannot.

Dante gives way to Randall because Kevin Smith is no longer the man who wrote Clerks.
Young Calvin gives way to older Calvin because I am no longer the young man who drafted Wake decades ago.

The narrative shifts because the narrator shifted.
The tone shifts because the life behind it shifted.
The genre shifts because truth requires it.

You think you’ve been telling one story your whole life—
until death forces you to look again
and you finally see the story you were actually living.
And that story is no less funny, no less painful, no less joyful than the first draft.
It’s just bigger.

Thanks again, Kevin — and my heartfelt condolences on the passing of your mother.
R.I.P. Amazing Grace.

Javier

© 2025 Chapelle Dorée Publishing, LLC. All rights reserved. This content may not be reproduced, distributed, or modified without permission.

Thanks, Kevin, PART II: Different Counters, Different Escapes

Dante Hicks, Calvin McShane, and the Choice You Don’t Know You’re Making

When I left off in Part I, I said that Dante Hicks and Calvin McShane were two guys stuck behind different kinds of counters—one literal, one metaphorical. Clerks II gives us the next stage of that comparison, and it’s where their paths start to diverge in ways that say a lot about class, clarity, and what we think we want from life.

Dante and the Cage He Didn’t Know He Wanted

Clerks II is a movie about escape—that’s what it pretends to be about, anyway.
Dante is convinced he needs to get out: out of Jersey, out of retail, out of the Quick Stop ruins, out of the life of “wasting potential” everyone keeps accusing him of.

Florida is supposed to be the answer.
A house, a career, a life plan, Emma’s vision of adulthood.

But the truth is that Dante doesn’t want any of it.
He just doesn’t know that yet.

Randall knows.
Becky suspects.
The viewers see it coming.

Dante, as always, is the last to figure it out.

His whole arc is about realizing that the life he thought he should want was just another cage—one built from respectability instead of convenience store shelving.

When he chooses to rebuild the Quick Stop with Randall, he’s not settling.
He’s recognizing the shape of his own happiness, even if it looks small from the outside.

He escapes the cage of other people’s expectations by stepping back into the life that actually fits him.

Calvin and the Cage He Tried Not to Notice

Calvin’s version of this moment comes in The Age of Unbecoming, the point where he finally admits what everyone else saw years earlier: the music career he dreamed of isn’t going to happen.

But unlike Dante—who realizes he doesn’t want the escape hatch he’s been offered—Calvin realizes something heavier:

The only way his dream might have succeeded was if he’d gone all in.
And he never did.
Because going all in felt irresponsible.

That’s the ache of it.
Calvin didn’t give up on his dream—he prepared for its failure.

He built the safety net his family asked for.
He hedged.
He split his life between the thing he wanted and the thing he was told was practical.

And practicality, as it tends to do, won.

When the lottery money runs out, Calvin discovers what Dante never had to:
Even the safety net has a cost.
He has to rebuild his life in the very direction he feared was waiting for him all along.

Dante runs from practicality into the life he didn’t know he wanted.
Calvin runs into practicality because the life he wanted never had a fair chance.

One escapes the cage.
The other finally admits he’s been standing inside one the whole time.

The Question That Haunts Both Stories

Dante’s question is simple:
“Why didn’t I see what I wanted sooner?”

Calvin’s is harder:
“Was I wrong for wanting something else in the first place?”

That’s the quiet tragedy of The Wake of Expectations—and the place where Clerks II unexpectedly becomes its thematic sibling:

Both men think they’re choosing one life over another.
But it’s only afterward that they understand what that choice meant.

Dante learns he was running toward the right life all along.
Calvin learns he was running away from the right life (at least, the one he thought he wanted) without realizing it.

And in both cases, the cage—literal or metaphorical—wasn’t inherently right or wrong.

It was just the place they finally learned to tell the truth to themselves.

Where This Leaves Calvin*

The lingering question for Calvin is the one Dante never has to face:

Is the practical cage a cage at all… or is it a life he can grow to love?

Is the life he ended up with not the one he would have chosen, but maybe better?

That’s the tension that carries Wake into A Pleasant Fiction: a man realizing the life he lives is meaningful not because it matches the dream he once had, but because of the people who fill it, the responsibilities that shape it, and the love that gives it form.

Dante builds a business with his best friend.
Calvin builds a life around everyone who made him who he is.

Different counters.
Different cages.
Different escapes.

But the same lesson:

Sometimes the life you end up with isn’t the consolation prize, even if it feels that way at first.
It just takes a little more living to realize that.

Javier

*One quick note for readers following the full Calvin arc:
In this essay, I’m talking specifically about Calvin at the end of The Age of Unbecoming — the younger Calvin who recognizes that his musical dream isn’t going to happen but hasn’t yet made peace with what that means.

His fuller realization doesn’t arrive until Chapter 13 of A Pleasant Fiction (“How Do You Keep the Music Playing”), when he finally understands the role that dream actually played in his life. As he puts it there:

“Sometimes it pays to be yourself. Sometimes things serve a different purpose than you initially envision. Sometimes you can’t see how things are connected until later.”

That’s the older Calvin speaking — the one who finally sees what the younger Calvin (and Dante, and most of us) can’t yet:
that a dream isn’t wasted just because it takes you somewhere you didn’t expect.

© 2025 Chapelle Dorée Publishing, LLC. All rights reserved. This content may not be reproduced, distributed, or modified without permission.

The Same Thing, But Different

A Thank-You to Kevin Smith

I’ve been planning to write this post since the day I started the blog. But I wasn’t ready then.

Some essays you can crank out in an afternoon; others you circle for years, waiting until you’re honest enough to write them. This one is that kind.

I’ve written about grief, love, friendship, memory—all the big things—but this one’s about voice. Not the polished voice that knows what it’s doing now, but the rough, profane, caffeine-fueled voice that first decided to tell the truth.

When people ask about my influences, they expect me to say Joyce or Didion—maybe Ellis or Salinger. But the writer who gave me permission to exist wasn’t in a novel. He was behind a counter in Leonardo, New Jersey.

Kevin Smith didn’t just influence me—he inspired me.

I wish I could say I got Clerks instantly. I didn’t. An actress friend told me, “You have to see this movie,” and I watched it—sort of confused why everyone was raving. I liked the Star Wars bit and I laughed at the “37!” joke, but the black-and-white, the shaky framing, the DIY roughness pulled me out of it. Kevin himself still jokes about how amateur the film looks. I didn’t yet understand that the roughness was the point.

Then I watched Mallrats (on VHS, no less), and that was it—I was in. Suddenly Kevin Smith clicked for me. I went back to Clerks and saw what everyone else saw from the beginning: a grainy little masterpiece that filmed my generation’s confession before we even knew what we were confessing. It made failure look cinematic. It made everyday conversation feel sacred. It made profanity sound like poetry.

(And if I’m honest, Clerks II is actually my favorite of the bunch.)

So I always knew I’d return to him—not to analyze, but to thank. Because every time I’ve written about frustration, friendship, or faith gone sideways, I can hear the Jersey counter in the background.

Make It Yourself

Clerks taught me that you could turn boredom into art. That meaning didn’t have to be grand or philosophical—it could come out of two guys complaining about their customers between cigarette breaks. It was the first time I saw cynicism treated as a form of sincerity.

And that changed everything.

The Wake of Expectations didn’t come from trying to imitate Clerks; it came from something Kevin said—or maybe didn’t. I swear I heard him say, “If you don’t see your world reflected in art, make it yourself.” I’ve looked for that quote everywhere and can’t find it. He’s definitely said things like it, and it’s absolutely a sentiment he shares, even if those exact words never left his mouth. So even if it’s a one-man Mandela Effect, it doesn’t matter. It was true the moment I heard (or imagined) it.

That line was the push. Kevin made movies about his friends, his neighborhood, his conversations. I wrote Wake because no one else was ever going to capture my version of that world.

The Same Ache, Different Setting

Clerks begins with Dante being called into work—pulled into responsibility he didn’t ask for.
The Wake of Expectations begins with Calvin’s family winning the lottery—handed a kind of privilege he never earned.

Very different circumstances, and yet both beginnings push their protagonists into lives that feel misaligned with who they believe they’re supposed to be.

Dante complains because he’s overworked and underpaid.
Calvin complains because even privilege can’t clear a path toward the life he actually wants.

They’re both stuck behind a counter of sorts, but the counters are built from different materials.
Dante’s is laminate and glass.
Calvin’s is mahogany and guilt.

Dante’s exhaustion is working-class—the kind that comes from grinding just to stay afloat.
Calvin’s exhaustion is existential—the kind that comes from being told to work his backup plan because the people who love him don’t believe he’ll succeed at the thing he’s meant for.

Dante lacks a dream he can picture. He just knows his current life isn’t it.
(Although, maybe it is and he just doesn’t recognize it—because not everyone’s girlfriend brings them lasagna at work, right?)

Calvin lacks permission to chase the dream he already knows.
(Or maybe he just lacks the courage—because why should anyone else believe in him if he doesn’t believe in himself, right?)

And if that makes Calvin sound less sympathetic—well, maybe he is. His frustration is elective. He’s privileged enough to have options, aware enough to resent them, and conflicted enough to feel trapped despite them. That’s what makes him interesting: he’s living the kind of life most people think they want, and still senses he’s in the wrong one.

Different Counters, Same Shift

That’s also why I’ve always thought of The Wake of Expectations as the same story told from another rung of Maslow’s hierarchy. Dante operates at the base: safety, belonging, love. Calvin starts at the top: esteem, self-actualization, meaning.

Dante’s question is, “Why do I have to be here?”

Calvin’s is, “Why isn’t this enough?”

Both questions come from a sense of being pulled off-course, but the tone is different. Dante’s frustration is weary and immediate. Calvin’s is quieter and more painful—the frustration of someone hedging his bets in a way that feels responsible, even though it quietly sabotages the dream that could only possibly work if he went all in.

Dante wants out of the job he has. Calvin wants to avoid the future job that’s been set aside as his safety net.

If Dante’s story ends with a shrug, Calvin’s begins with that quiet, internal crack—the moment you realize your dream isn’t being discouraged outright, just gently buried under layers of practicality. And that was the first sign I was doing the same thing Kevin did—telling the story of someone who’s stuck, but for entirely different reasons.

The Long Gratitude

If I was even a halfway decent writer in the beginning, it wasn’t because I grew up worshipping novelists. It was because I had a good education. I liked The Great Gatsby. I appreciated Shakespeare. I understood language enough to know when something felt true on the page.

But I didn’t have a favorite author. I didn’t start writing because of books. I wasn’t trying to emulate anyone.

I found Salinger, Bukowski, and Palahniuk along the way—long after I’d already started writing The Wake of Expectations. Cosmo was the one who handed me their work and said, “Here, you might like these guys.” And he was right. They didn’t inspire me to write, but they gave me permission to say things in a certain way—with more honesty, more bite, more vulnerability than I’d let myself use before.

But my real influences weren’t novelists at all. They were movies, TV, comics—storytellers who shaped how my generation talked and listened and admitted things out loud. Kevin Smith most of all. He was the first person who made me believe that ordinary life, spoken honestly, was enough.

He made art that didn’t wait for permission.
He made failure funny and friendship holy.
And he made me believe that talking about meaninglessness could mean something.

So thank you, Kevin.

You showed me that truth can wear a hoodie and curse a lot.
You proved that profanity and profundity can share the same sentence.
You turned your corner of New Jersey into mythology, and you made the rest of us believe our corners mattered too.

I just took your lesson to another counter—one stocked not with cigarettes and coffee, but with expectations. And from there, I started telling my own version of the same story.

The same thing.
But different.

Javier

© 2025 Chapelle Dorée Publishing, LLC. All rights reserved. This content may not be reproduced, distributed, or modified without permission.

Is It Wrong to Want Something That’s Bad for You, or That You Can’t Have?

⚠️ Note: This post contains spoilers by way of thematic reflections on The Wake of Expectations and A Pleasant Fiction. Those who haven't finished both novels may prefer to read them first.

There's a question that runs quietly beneath the surface of our lives, influencing our decisions, our dreams, and our regrets: Is it wrong to want something even if it might ultimately be bad for you, unattainable, or likely to bring unintended pain?

In my novels The Wake of Expectations and A Pleasant Fiction, protagonist Calvin McShane grapples frequently with this question, illuminating the tension between ambition, honesty, and reality through his own life and the lives of those closest to him. Over three parts, we’ll explore three specific situations from Calvin’s journey, each casting unique insights on this deeply human dilemma:

1. Calvin’s dream of becoming a professional musician

2. Calvin’s mother’s complex dance between ambition and caregiving

3. Calvin’s emotional honesty and romantic feelings toward Dani

Part 1: Calvin’s Musical Aspirations

From a young age, Calvin dreams passionately of becoming a professional musician. He dedicates countless hours practicing, writing songs, and envisioning himself on stage. By any conventional measure, though, Calvin’s musical journey ends in disappointment—he never achieves professional success, never earns widespread recognition, and never fully realizes the career he'd imagined.

Was Calvin wrong to want this so badly?

Viewed solely through an external, outcome-focused lens, Calvin’s musical ambitions seem misguided, even foolish. But life rarely follows straight paths, and meaning rarely announces itself in obvious ways. It’s only later, looking back, that Calvin realizes the value hidden within his seemingly unsuccessful pursuit.

Through music, Calvin expresses himself deeply, articulating emotions and ideas he struggles to convey otherwise. The act of creating music becomes a crucial form of self-expression, enriching his inner life regardless of external validation. Even more unexpectedly, his passion for music helps him forge a profound bond with Tom Owens, the mentor who guides him professionally in an entirely different field. Tom, too, had youthful dreams of musical greatness, and this shared experience creates trust and understanding, becoming foundational to Calvin’s future career.

In hindsight, the trajectory seems almost predestined—each disappointment and detour necessary to bring Calvin precisely where he ends up. What appeared initially as failure reveals itself, in retrospect, as deeply meaningful and even essential.

Thus, Calvin’s journey in music emphasizes a fundamental truth: sometimes the value of a dream isn't in achieving the specific goal we set out to reach, but in the ways it shapes us, in the relationships it builds, and in the truths it reveals along the way.

Part 2: Lyanna’s Ambition and Sacrifice

Calvin’s mother, Lyanna, illustrates an even deeper complexity. As a young girl, Lyanna dreamed of financial success and the stability symbolized by a fully staffed mansion. This ambition propelled her to build a successful business, providing for her family, especially her disabled son, Jared, whose care was both deeply fulfilling and overwhelmingly demanding.

Lyanna's life becomes a delicate balancing act between her undeniable responsibility to Jared and her equally powerful drive toward self-actualization through her career. Neither aspect could be easily set aside—one was rooted in profound love and obligation, the other essential to her identity and emotional fulfillment.

Yet, human limits cannot be ignored. Lyanna inevitably had to engage in a form of emotional and responsibility triage, prioritizing her efforts where they were most urgently needed. Jared's care, always demanding and unrelenting, naturally became the highest priority, leaving fewer emotional and physical resources for her other children and husband. This imbalance wasn't due to selfishness or carelessness; it was the inescapable consequence of living within human constraints.

The unintended consequence extended deeply into her marriage as well. Her husband felt increasingly neglected and unappreciated—not only due to Lyanna’s divided attention but also because of what was being asked of him to support her dreams. This growing resentment became the catalyst for his own misguided decisions involving his musical protege, Solitaire—decisions that ultimately brought further turmoil and heartbreak into the family.

Calvin recognizes this deeply human struggle. He sees clearly that his mother's occasional emotional neglect and the strain on his parents’ marriage weren’t reflections of flawed character or lack of love, but rather a testament to the harsh reality of human limitation and the complexity of interwoven responsibilities and ambitions. Lyanna did the best she could under impossible circumstances.

Her story demonstrates vividly how the value of ambition sometimes lies not in its fulfillment but in its motivational force, even when the cost of striving toward our dreams includes inevitable sacrifices and unforeseen consequences.

Part 3: Calvin’s Romantic Honesty and the Risk with Dani

Calvin’s relationship with Dani reveals yet another dimension of this theme. Calvin develops deep romantic feelings for Dani, a close and valued friend. He faces a difficult choice: preserve the friendship by keeping silent, or risk it entirely by revealing how he truly feels.

Calvin chooses honesty, knowing it could damage their relationship irreparably. The result isn't what he hopes for—the romance he desires never materializes, and the friendship does suffer, at least temporarily. From an external viewpoint, Calvin’s attempt appears to fail.

Yet, Calvin could hardly have chosen otherwise. Suppressing his feelings indefinitely would have meant living dishonestly, always wondering about what might have been. The courage to express his emotions, painful as it became, allowed him to remain authentic and true to himself.

Unexpectedly, Calvin’s honesty about his feelings for Dani prevented him from returning to an old relationship with Ilse, one that seemed comfortable but, in retrospect, would have been emotionally unhealthy and limiting, for both of them. His pursuit of Dani, though ultimately unsuccessful, clarified essential truths about himself, his emotional needs, and his capacity for honesty.

Calvin’s experience underscores the idea that emotional honesty is inherently risky, but deeply necessary. Sometimes the value of wanting something—even something unattainable or potentially damaging—lies in the courage and authenticity of acknowledging and pursuing it, rather than in the outcome itself.

Conclusion: The Undeniable Nature of Our Desires

Through Calvin’s musical aspirations, his mother’s complex ambitions, and his emotional risk with Dani, a powerful theme emerges: some desires are simply undeniable. There are things in life we pursue because we have no real choice—like breathing, they are fundamental to our existence, authenticity, and emotional survival.

Writers write because they can’t not write. Musicians create music because the silence of not creating is intolerable. Lovers risk their hearts because the alternative of never knowing feels unbearable. Even when we understand the potential costs, the cost of not pursuing these essential dreams and desires often feels even greater—more intangible, perhaps, but just as real.

When we ask, "Is it wrong to want something we can't have or shouldn't have?" we're often, in essence, asking, "Is it wrong to breathe?" It’s a question that doesn’t make sense, because the wanting is not a choice. These deeply embedded desires, whether fulfilled or unfulfilled, shape who we become, define our character, and reveal the profound human need for meaning, honesty, and self-expression.

Javier

© 2025 Chapelle Dorée Publishing, LLC. All rights reserved. This content may not be reproduced, distributed, or modified without permission.

Final Reflection: From Distortion to Clarity

This essay is the seventh and final entry in our series comparing and contrasting C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed and Javier De Lucia’s A Pleasant Fiction.

The series begins with A Pleasant Fiction positioned as an existential reply to A Grief Observed—a humanist conversation with a man who sought divine coherence in the aftermath of loss. Where Lewis looked upward for answers, Calvin looks inward. That divergence carries through each essay, from the survey of grief literature that situates both writers within a broader lineage to Calvin’s critique of theodicy and his rejection of mystery as a moral absolution. Each step has moved us from theology toward psychology, from the search for explanation to the practice of understanding.

Early in A Grief Observed, Lewis confesses his fear that his memory of his wife, Joy, is not Joy—that to remember is to distort, and that distance from the moment means distance from truth. For Lewis, memory is a betrayal of presence; reflection is an act of desecration. He sees the mind as untrustworthy, its reconstructions tainted by loss and longing. His faith requires that the truth of the beloved exist beyond human perception—preserved in God’s keeping rather than his own flawed recollection.

Calvin, by contrast, builds his entire enterprise on the opposite conviction: that reflection is not distortion but revelation. The Wake of Expectations is a catalogue of misunderstandings—a record of how little he truly saw of the people he loved while living among them. Only in retrospect can he begin to see them clearly, and in seeing them clearly, to see himself. Where Lewis clings to proximity as the guarantor of truth, Calvin discovers that time is the necessary lens through which truth finally comes into focus.

That is the essential inversion. Lewis grieves because memory falters; Calvin finds peace because memory deepens. Lewis fears that he will forget his wife and, in doing so, lose her again; Calvin understands that by reimagining his past—not to preserve it, but to comprehend it—he grants grace both to others and to himself.

And perhaps that is where these two works ultimately meet: both are written in the aftermath of love, by men confronting the limits of their understanding. But where Lewis flinches—retreating into mystery—Calvin steps forward, accepting the incompleteness of knowledge, and the recognition of it as such, as part of what makes understanding possible.

Lewis mourns the distortion; Calvin learns to embrace it. Both persist in its wake.

© 2025 Chapelle Dorée Publishing, LLC. All rights reserved. This content may not be reproduced, distributed, or modified without permission.

Bargaining, Rationalization, and Consolation — Chapters 3 and 4 of A Grief Observed

By the time we reach Chapter 3 of A Grief Observed, something in Lewis begins to soften. The raw, unfiltered pain of the earlier chapters gives way to the impulse to make peace — not through understanding, but through reconciliation with the familiar language of faith. His grief, once defiant, begins to seek shape. This is where the book subtly turns: from confrontation to comfort.

I. Bargaining Disguised as Acceptance

Chapter 3 represents Lewis’s quiet negotiation with loss. Having exhausted his anger, he begins to reason with it — to find a frame that makes the pain survivable. He tells himself that his marriage may have reached completion, that its purpose was fulfilled. It’s a gentle form of bargaining, disguised as acceptance: if I can see this as whole, perhaps I can live with it.

This is not exactly self-deception; it’s survival. Lewis, whose intellect had always demanded order, tries to stitch coherence into the senseless, but without his religious scaffolding, he simply cannot do it.

II. The Leg Cut Off Again

Lewis observes that “in grief nothing stays put… the same leg is cut off time after time.” It’s one of his most striking insights — and one of the truest. Grief does not fade; it recurs. The pain returns not because we fail to heal, but because remembering is part of what it means to love.

Yet Lewis’s response to this recurrence is to seek containment. He wants the wound to mean something — to point toward a larger pattern that redeems the repetition. But the repetition itself is the meaning. It is the proof that love endures beyond reason. The wound reopens because we keep living, and living keeps invoking what was lost.

III. Submission Disguised as Resolution

By Chapter 4, Lewis’s bargaining evolves into a quieter form of submission. He decides that his mistake was loving the earthly too much — that his grief is a sign of misplaced devotion. His answer, then, is to reorder his love: to submit first to God and trust that everything else will follow.

It reads as resolution, but it’s really an act of surrender. He cannot sustain the rebellion that defined the earlier chapters; it is too costly. So he returns to the framework that once gave him stability, not because it satisfies his questions, but because it gives him justification to stop asking.

This is the tender paradox of A Grief Observed: Lewis’s faith, so tested, bends under the strain, and in bending, becomes his shelter. He flinches — and in doing so, he survives.

IV. Acceptance Without Bargaining

Calvin McShane’s acceptance in A Pleasant Fiction is different in form but not in spirit. He does not bargain with the universe for meaning, nor does he submit to mystery for comfort. Instead, he acknowledges that his family’s lives were meaningful because they were lived — that their presence shaped him, and their absence continues to.

His acceptance is not about replacing pain with purpose but integrating both into the same truth: love matters even when it ends. In accepting their deaths, Calvin also accepts his own mortality — the inevitability that he, too, will one day exist only in memory. And eventually, not even that. This is not resignation; it’s recognition. To live fully is to accept that meaning does not depend on permanence.

V. Conclusion: The Consolations We Choose

Chapters 3 and 4 of A Grief Observed mark the point where Lewis turns back from the edge. Having stared into the silence and found no answer, he reaches for the language of faith—not as a conclusion, but as comfort. His bargaining and submission are not failures of belief, but the natural recoil of someone who has nowhere else to go. He returns to the story that steadies him, the one that lets him go on living. It’s not cowardice; it’s human.

Calvin’s acceptance in A Pleasant Fiction moves along a different path but toward the same horizon of peace. He does not search for meaning in what happened so much as affirm the meaning that remains. His parents, his brother, his child—they are gone, but not erased. Their lives mattered because they were lived, and because he carries them forward. The continuity is not mystical; it is human.

“They matter,” Calvin says. “Because I’m still here.” And even when he is no longer, he still was.

That is his faith—not in eternity as promise, but in existence as fact. Death ends a life, not its significance. The traces endure in memory, in influence, in the quiet ways love alters what survives it.

Lewis finds solace in returning to the eternal he once knew.

Calvin finds solace in recognizing that what was real remains real, even when it’s gone.

Both seek a way to live with absence. One leans into faith; the other into being.

And between them lies the full measure of grief: the need to make meaning, and the grace of realizing that sometimes, meaning is already there.

© 2025 Chapelle Dorée Publishing, LLC. All rights reserved. This content may not be reproduced, distributed, or modified without permission.

Between Faith and Silence

A Brief Interlude Between Chapters 2 and 3 of A Grief Observed

I wrote a “Chapter 2” essay as part of this series. It was called The Problem of Cruelty, and looking back, it treads the same ground as the earlier piece on theodicy—probably more than anyone but a theologian would ever want to read. So rather than repeat myself, I want to take a step sideways here.

Let me be clear: I’m not a theologian. My background is in social theory and, by extension, philosophy and economics—overlapping fields that sometimes interact with theology, though often uneasily. My interest isn’t in defending or dismantling belief but in examining how we reason our way toward it or away from it. That’s probably why I find A Grief Observed compelling, if somewhat disappointing: it’s less a defense of faith than an autopsy of it.

And A Pleasant Fiction isn’t a theological book—at least not intentionally, and certainly not primarily. Faith and doubt appear in it only as side effects of grief, tangents in the search for meaning. Still, once you’ve written about loss, you eventually bump into the God question whether you mean to or not.

So rather than revisit theodicy, let’s grant Lewis his premise. For the sake of argument, let’s accept that the whole matter—suffering, faith, divine will—is simply beyond human understanding.

What then?

If that’s true, it carries a strange consequence: God made us such that we couldn’t understand Him. And if incomprehension is built into creation, then disbelief can’t be rebellion—it’s obedience to design. We either doubt because we are, by definition, incapable of fully knowing something we cannot understand, or we claim certainty about something we cannot understand, which to someone like Calvin simply feels dishonest. (And yes, I realize we could get into an entirely separate philosophical debate on what “knowing” means, but I’m referring to the Platonic epistemic sense of the word here—because that’s really the point of this sort of discussion.)

I’ll leave it there. Even acknowledging the limits of human understanding—we are, after all, creatures evolved to navigate and survive the physical world, not to unravel metaphysics—I’ve never found the retreat into mystery a satisfying intellectual maneuver. Not when the claim is to engage honestly with the merits of belief. If one chooses to exit the discussion, that’s their right. But let’s not pretend that abandoning the debate is the same as resolving the contradictions. And that’s pretty much what Lewis does.

(And to be clear, I’m not referring to a debate between me and Lewis here on this blog, but rather the one he has with himself in Chapter 2 — a debate I was eager to see him finish, only to watch him walk away from it.)

In any case, that will lead us into Chapters 3 and 4—the subject of our next essay.

Javier

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The Door Slams Shut — Chapter 1 of A Grief Observed and the First Silence of A Pleasant Fiction

This essay is the fourth in a series comparing and contrasting A Pleasant Fiction with C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed. Coincidentally, at the time of this writing, both books sit together among the top twelve titles on Amazon’s Death & Grief bestseller list.

Every story of grief begins with disorientation. C. S. Lewis opens A Grief Observed in a panic: his faith has cracked and he can’t quite tell what remains. Javier De Lucia’s Calvin McShane begins A Pleasant Fiction in a similar fog — not theological panic, but existential confusion. Both men speak from the same hollow of first loss, where thought and language falter. But even here, at the threshold, the difference between them is already visible. Lewis hears the echo of a slamming door; Calvin hears only the hum of a quiet house.

I. “Where Is God?” — The Shock of Absence

The first line of A Grief Observed is an accusation. “Where is God?” Lewis asks. “Go to Him when your need is desperate … and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside.”

Grief, for Lewis, is instantly personal and theological. The question is not simply Why did this happen? but Why did He let this happen to me? The collapse is relational — lover to Beloved, creature to Creator. He experiences divine silence as betrayal.

Calvin McShane opens A Pleasant Fiction from a quieter despair. His world is already godless, so there is no one left to accuse. “If I still believed in God,” he says, “I’d say He was cruel.” The subjunctive is everything. The door is not slammed; the house has long been empty. His bewilderment is not metaphysical but human: how to function, how to keep breathing, how to keep memory from turning toxic.

Where Lewis’s shock is that God seems gone, Calvin’s is that life goes on. The absence is the same, but the posture differs: one rattles the door, the other wanders the rooms.

II. Self-Consciousness and the Mirror of Pain

Midway through Chapter 1, Lewis notices that grief has turned him into a stranger to himself. “I see the image of a man in pain, but that’s all. I can’t feel for him.” He fears that sorrow has made him hollow, that his words about faith are now only noise. His analytical mind turns inward until it becomes self-devouring — the philosopher dissecting his own heartbeat.

Calvin feels that same split, but he treats it with humor. “I can’t walk and chew gum at the same time,” he says of himself early in A Pleasant Fiction. The self-deprecation masks the same anxiety: that grief has made him clumsy, detached, absurd. Both men are haunted by self-consciousness — the modern curse of seeing one’s own suffering from the outside.

The difference is tone. Lewis fears introspection will destroy his faith. Calvin accepts introspection as all that’s left. For Lewis, self-analysis is a symptom of doubt; for Calvin, it’s a survival strategy.

III. Writing as Survival

Lewis admits that he must write to stay sane. “By writing it all down,” he says, “I believe I get a little outside it.” He wonders whether this is healthy or self-indulgent, whether the act of analysis distances him from genuine feeling.

Calvin never apologizes for writing. In the final chapters of A Pleasant Fiction he recognizes that narration itself is the means of endurance — that by telling the story, he is preserving what otherwise would vanish. What Lewis fears might alienate him from love is, for Calvin, the only way to keep love alive.

This is where the two converge most closely and then part forever. Both discover that language is the only tool left after loss; but Lewis uses it to rebuild theology, while Calvin uses it to reconstruct memory. Lewis writes toward God; Calvin writes toward self-understanding.

IV. The Problem of Presence

Lewis’s early anguish revolves around the question of divine presence. “So present He seems at times in good fortune,” he complains, “so absent now.” His pain comes from the inconsistency: a God who once felt near now feels gone. His lament assumes a relationship betrayed.

Calvin would find that notion foreign. He does not recall a time when God felt near. For him, presence is human: the warmth of a hand, the echo of laughter, the persistence of memory. His losses — his parents, his brother, the unborn child — are felt as absences of people, not of providence.

Thus, Calvin’s grief is distributed; Lewis’s is centralized. One loses an entire metaphysical order; the other loses the fragile network of human meaning that made life worth living.

Both men are bereaved, but of different gods.

V. The Failure of Consolation

Lewis confesses that no religious comfort works. “Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion.” His grief becomes a crisis of expectation: he feels God’s absence and can’t reconcile it with a faith built on the promise of presence. If God is real, why doesn’t He intervene?

Calvin reads that impulse almost as self-indulgence. His instinct is to rebuke it. So something terrible happened to you—now you doubt? Tragedy is everywhere, every day. If the suffering of others never shook your belief, why should your own loss suddenly make you wise? In his mind, that’s not faith failing; that’s ego speaking. He concedes that it’s a poor argument to reject God merely because pain touched you, but he adds that it’s just as empty to affirm God’s existence because others suffer more or because your own life, on balance, has been good. Both positions make belief a function of luck.

Where Lewis mourns divine absence as betrayal, Calvin exposes the narcissism hidden in that disappointment. Lewis’s lament implicitly assumes that God’s goodness should manifest as personal consolation—that divinity ought to answer human pain. Calvin’s disbelief runs deeper, because ought is trumped by is. Lewis can insist that God ought to answer, but even he concedes that God does not. Calvin takes that absence at face value.

VI. Two Silences

By the end of Chapter 1, Lewis’s tone softens. He begins to suspect that his anger might be part of the process, not a disproof of belief. The slammed door becomes, tentatively, a test. His question shifts from Where is God? to What is He trying to teach me?

Calvin never reopens that door. His apostasy is resignation, not defiance. The universe owes no explanation. What Lewis interprets as the hiddenness of God, Calvin experiences as the neutrality of nature. The silence, in both books, is absolute — but only Lewis insists it must belong to someone.

The result is two forms of faith:

• Lewis’s faith in mystery.

• Calvin’s faith through acceptance.

Both are acts of courage, but they travel in opposite directions.

VII. Continuity and Aftermath

When Chapter 1 of A Grief Observed closes, Lewis is still circling the question of divine love. He has not yet bargained or repented; he simply trembles in the void. A Pleasant Fiction opens in the same emotional register but different intellectual climate. Calvin is already post-theological; his project begins where Lewis’s will end.

The pairing of these openings reveals a subtle evolution: grief no longer needs God to be real. The raw human shock — the sense that “the sky has fallen inward” — is the same in both men. But Calvin no longer translates that shock into theology. He stays with the human texture of it, the taste of coffee gone bitter, the quieting of a once-full house. His first silence is not divine; it’s domestic.

VIII. Conclusion

Chapter 1 of A Grief Observed and the opening of A Pleasant Fiction are twin portraits of disorientation, drawn from different centuries of belief. Both capture the helpless first phase of mourning — when intellect, habit, and faith all fail. But the questions they ask set their trajectories apart.

Lewis begins with Where is God?
Calvin begins with What now?

Between those questions lies sixty years of cultural change — from faith’s struggle with silence to humanity’s attempt to live within it. One hears the door slam; the other stands in the empty room. Both listen. Only one expects an answer.

© 2025 Chapelle Dorée Publishing, LLC. All rights reserved. This content may not be reproduced, distributed, or modified without permission.

Calvin McShane and the Collapse of Theodicy

This essay continues my ongoing dialogue between A Pleasant Fiction and C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed. While the earlier comparison traced how both books approach grief, this one turns to Calvin McShane’s deeper philosophical crisis—not just the loss of faith, but the collapse of theodicy itself: the idea that divine goodness can coexist with human suffering.

I. Introduction

In A Grief Observed, C. S. Lewis wrestles with God, trying to reconcile divine love with human pain. Calvin McShane, the narrator of A Pleasant Fiction, faces grief in the aftermath of faith’s collapse. But his story is not simply one of disbelief. It is a meditation on what remains when every theological explanation breaks down—a reckoning with the collapse of theodicy itself.

Calvin’s loss is not an intellectual crisis so much as an existential one. He no longer debates the problem of suffering; he lives inside it.

II. The Hidden God Problem

In The Wake of Expectations, during his confession with Father Caughlin, Calvin first voices his frustration with abstract solutions to divine foreknowledge and free will.

The theologian’s solutions (Calvin specifically expresses skepticism over the Molinist solution) fall flat for him—logically incoherent, off-topic, intellectually dishonest or evasive. The book doesn’t explicitly delve into the details of Calvin’s personal theology, but it lives in the subtext.

By A Pleasant Fiction, Calvin’s skepticism has deepened, both as a result of continued intellectual introspection and lived experience. When he loses his unborn son, the question of God’s existence becomes meaningless. Whether God is absent or merely hiding, the result is the same: silence in the moment of greatest need.

Lewis agonizes over that silence; Calvin accepts it as fact. What Lewis treats as divine testing, Calvin reads as the ordinary condition of existence.

The lived experience of absence is enough.

A world in which God hides looks exactly like a world in which God does not exist.

III. Mystery as Love?

Lewis leans heavily on the idea that God still loves us, even when His ways seem cruel. Calvin rejects that move as incoherent. If divine love is indistinguishable from cruelty, then to call it “love” is to empty the word of meaning. Mystery does not reconcile love and suffering—it collapses the categories entirely.

This is why Calvin mocks the platitudes so often offered to explain suffering. “God works in mysterious ways” becomes, in his telling, a cruel joke.

And when someone suggests that Jared’s suffering could be redemptive, Calvin snaps:

“If you believe that, you probably believe it’s because somebody ate a f—ing apple.”

In that moment, theology’s explanatory power evaporates. For Calvin and his family, Jared is cognitively incapable of moral transgression. His father even muses that “[Jared] has a one-way ticket to heaven.” What redemption through suffering does an innocent require? Or, Calvin suggests, perhaps we are to believe that the redemption is a vicarious one for his family?

Like Christ, Jared must suffer for their sins. To give his family members an opportunity to prove themselves worthy. To provide for their expiation, redemption, and salvation.

Calvin finds that notion repugnant. “Is this the best an omnipotent, omnibenevolent being can do?” he asks. “Find a better way to serve your mysterious purpose.”

The story of original sin, the entire architecture of divine justice, collapses under the weight of his brother’s pain.

IV. From Rage to Resignation

But the flashback to the unborn son is the true climax of Calvin’s loss of faith.

Forced into an impossible choice—watch his wife suffer terribly and lose the child anyway, or end the pregnancy and live with the knowledge of complicity—he erupts:

“If I still believed in God, I’d say He was cruel… I’d say f— you too.”

Later losses—his father, his brother Jared—unfold in the aftermath. His refrain, “If I still believed…,” is not hesitation but resignation. God has already failed him. There is no one left to rage against.

In A Grief Observed, Lewis eventually apologizes for his blasphemies, explaining that they were born of anguish, not conviction. Calvin offers no such retraction. His anger is not performative; it is diagnostic. He is not testing God’s patience but describing the feeling of His absence.

For Calvin, there is no God to offend, and hence no one for him to apologize to.

V. Wet Feet on the Beach

Calvin’s position can be summed up by a twist on the famous “Footprints in the Sand” parable.

In the original, a man walks along a metaphorical beach with Jesus, the length of which represents his life, each step representing a moment from his past. The two of them leave footprints, side-by-side, in the sand as they walk together along the water’s edge. But when the man looks back at the hardest times in his life, he sees only one set of footprints. “Where were you, Lord?” he asks. Jesus replies, “When you saw only one set of footprints, that was when I carried you.”

Calvin would likely ask, “Then why were my feet still wet?”

It’s bitter. It’s funny. And it’s true. It’s a man’s lived experience confronting a comforting platitude.

He walked through suffering—he was not carried. Whether God was absent or hidden makes no difference—the result is soaked feet, not divine rescue.

In a world where faith once explained pain and psychology later mapped it, Calvin’s soaked-feet realism belongs to a third era—one that accepts grief as elemental, not exceptional.

VI. Conclusion

Calvin’s project is not to prove that God does not exist. He lives in the aftermath of that conclusion. Nor does he endeavor to lead anyone to apostasy. He’s merely describing his experience, one which doesn’t require God’s nonexistence, but only makes sense in His absence.

That absence, whether deliberate or inherent, collapses theodicy. What survives is not theology but endurance.

Friendship, art, memory, and continuity become his “pleasant fictions.” They are not escapist illusions but necessary acts of meaning-making in a silent universe. They may not be perfect, but they are undeniably present.

Calvin doesn’t resolve the problem of suffering; he simply survives it.

And in that survival—in his willingness to keep walking, feet soaked but uncarried—he discovers something that no system of belief could ever deliver: the quiet dignity of persistence.

His pleasant fictions are not escapes from truth but shelters within it—fragile, human, and finally enough.

© 2025 Chapelle Dorée Publishing, LLC. All rights reserved. This content may not be reproduced, distributed, or modified without permission.

From Faith to Framework: The Evolution of Grief Literature from Lewis to De Lucia

Grief has always been one of literature’s most honest subjects and one of its most revealing mirrors. Every era writes grief in the language of its worldview: for the faithful, it becomes a test of belief; for the rationalist, a psychological process; for the modern existentialist, a negotiation with meaning itself. Between C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed (1961) and Javier De Lucia’s A Pleasant Fiction (2025), we can trace the full arc of that transformation—the movement from submission to self-understanding, from divine order to human endurance.

The Theological Beginning: C.S. Lewis and the Language of Faith

When C.S. Lewis published A Grief Observed under the pseudonym N.W. Clerk, his cultural moment was still governed by the primacy of faith. Psychology had not yet entered mainstream discourse, and the vocabulary of therapy was not yet the lingua franca of mourning. Lewis’s audience expected grief to be reconciled within theology, not theory.

His diary of loss, written after the death of his wife Joy Davidman, was radical for its candor but traditional in structure. Each entry begins in emotional chaos but seeks resolution in religious logic. Clerk wrestles with divine cruelty, tests his faith against suffering, and ultimately rebuilds his belief by reinterpreting grief as divine instruction. The text’s structure mirrors liturgy: confession, doubt, repentance, revelation. Even his most harrowing questions—“Is God a Cosmic Sadist?”—are framed as challenges meant to deepen faith, not destroy it.

For Lewis, meaning comes from above. When reason fails, he does not abandon theology; he surrenders to it. His acceptance at the end—“His silence is not absence, but presence”—is the surrender of the believer who has argued himself back into submission.

The Psychological Turn: Grief as Process

Only eight years later, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross would publish On Death and Dying (1969), giving the world its first secular grammar of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Her model was descriptive rather than prescriptive, but its impact was revolutionary. Grief was no longer a theological ordeal or a moral test; it was a human process with recognizable stages.

This shift redefined the literature of mourning. Writers who followed began to narrate grief not as divine pedagogy but as psychological evolution. The work of mourning became an act of self-understanding. Faith might still appear, but no longer as the unquestioned center. The bereaved were now protagonists in their own emotional development.

By the 1970s and 1980s, memoirs and novels alike reflected this transformation: grief narratives became laboratories for exploring identity, memory, and the self’s reconstruction. The church gave way to the therapist’s office; the confessional became the diary.

The Modern Era: Grief Without a Safety Net

Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) represents the mature form of that secular mode. Didion writes not to redeem or to persuade, but to observe—to record the mind’s refusal to accept the finality of death. Her “magical thinking” is not a theological regression but a psychological defense: she keeps her husband’s shoes because she cannot yet admit he will never wear them again.

Didion’s prose is clinical, recursive, stripped of sentiment. She belongs to a post-faith world where the rituals of religion have been replaced by the rituals of language. Her grief is intellectualized but not anesthetized; its power lies in her precision. The reader witnesses not divine revelation but cognitive dissonance.

Her book sits midway between Lewis and De Lucia: it no longer seeks God, but it still seeks sense. The structure of the sacred has vanished, but the yearning for order remains.

The Existential Present: Javier De Lucia and the Language of Continuity

By the time of A Pleasant Fiction, grief literature has reached its existential phase. The language of theology has receded, and even the psychological framework of stages has become implicit—an assumed background rather than an explicit guide. Calvin McShane’s story begins where Lewis’s ends: after faith, after bargaining, after the attempt to impose meaning.

What remains is endurance.

Calvin’s project is not to make peace with God, nor even to outthink grief, but to live with it—honestly, without consolation or promise of resolution. His narrative accepts grief as a permanent companion, not a problem to be solved. Meaning is no longer transcendent or therapeutic; it is relational. Continuity replaces closure.

This is the logical next step in the evolution of grief writing: grief as existential realism. A Pleasant Fiction acknowledges the same ache that haunted Lewis and Didion but declines to translate it into either theology or psychology. Calvin’s reflections on his parents’ deaths, his brother’s suffering, and his own disillusionment form a composite of the modern condition: the collapse of inherited frameworks and the search for meaning that remains afterward.

Bookends of an Era

Seen together, A Grief Observed and A Pleasant Fiction mark the beginning and the culmination of a long cultural shift:

Lewis (1961) De Lucia (2025)

Theological framework Existential framework

Grief as test of faith Grief as condition of being

Meaning through submission Meaning through endurance

Resolution as divine mystery Resolution as human continuity

Vertical relationship (man and God) Horizontal relationship (self and others)

Between them stands half a century of evolving humanism. Where Lewis sought to reconcile grief to a divine order, De Lucia reconciles it to human limitation. Both men arrive at peace, but the paths could not be more different. Lewis finds comfort in mystery; Calvin finds comfort in honesty. The difference reflects not just two authors, but two civilizations—the theological and the post-theological.

The Continuing Conversation

Grief literature has always been a mirror for what an age believes about meaning. Lewis’s age believed meaning could be found above; Didion’s sought it within; De Lucia’s locates it between people. The movement from God to psyche to connection traces not the diminishment of faith but the expansion of empathy.

If A Grief Observed taught readers that doubt could coexist with belief, A Pleasant Fiction teaches that love can persist without it. Both insist that grief is not simply loss—it is continuity, expressed in the language available to its time. What changes is not the ache but the vocabulary.

And so the conversation continues: each generation rewriting sorrow in its own dialect of courage.

Selected Bibliography: Landmarks in Modern Grief Literature

C.S. Lewis – A Grief Observed (1961)
A theologian’s diary of bereavement that transformed private anguish into public apologetics; the foundational modern text of faith-based mourning.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross – On Death and Dying (1969)
Introduced the five-stage model that redefined grief as psychological process rather than moral trial.

Joan Didion – The Year of Magical Thinking (2005)
A meticulous, secular meditation on cognitive dissonance and denial following her husband’s sudden death—grief as observation rather than revelation.

Joyce Carol Oates – A Widow’s Story (2011)
A feverish, near-diaristic account of loss and identity collapse; demonstrates the confessional impulse of post-Didion grief writing.

Julian Barnes – Levels of Life (2013)
A poignant meditation on love and loss that blends memoir, biography, and fiction to explore grief’s layered emotional landscapes; bridges traditional and contemporary secular mourning.

Max Porter – Grief Is the Thing with Feathers (2015)
An experimental narrative combining prose and poetry, blending myth and modern psychology to depict grief’s surreal and transformative power; represents a hybrid form in modern grief literature.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – Notes on Grief (2021)
A brief, lyrical meditation on the death of the author’s father—grief refracted through culture, diaspora, and language itself.

Michelle Zauner – Crying in H Mart (2021)
A Korean American musician’s memoir of losing her mother and rediscovering connection through food and cultural memory; bridges generational grief with heritage reclamation.

Javier De Lucia – A Pleasant Fiction (2025)
An existential narrative that completes the arc begun by Lewis, exploring grief without God yet not without love—grief as continuity rather than consolation.

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A Pleasant Fiction as an Existential Reply to A Grief Observed

Note: The following essay is the first in a series comparing and contrasting A Pleasant Fiction to and with C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed. It is an AI-assisted analysis written in a style similar to the essays in Coming of Age, Coming to Terms, and will appear in the forthcoming second companion volume to the Calvin McShane series, Musa Ex Machina, due out in 2026.

Two books written more than sixty years apart stand like bookends on the question of how a human being survives grief. C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed (1961) and Javier De Lucia’s A Pleasant Fiction (2025) begin in the same raw place—the shock of loss, the shattering of meaning—but they part almost immediately in purpose. Lewis turns inward toward God; De Lucia, through his narrator Calvin McShane, turns outward toward life. One seeks reconciliation through submission, the other through endurance. The result is not a dialogue of faith versus unbelief so much as a record of two very different ways of remaining human after everything collapses.

The Shared Beginning: Raw Grief

In their opening movements, the two books share an unmistakable emotional DNA. Both capture the early stage of grief before language catches up to experience. Lewis’s pseudonymous narrator N. W. Clerk writes of a world that has “shut up” on him, of a God who seems “deaf.” Calvin McShane opens A Pleasant Fiction in much the same paralysis: the fog of routines, the weight of loss that distorts time itself. Each man speaks from the hollow between disbelief and faith, where pain is still an astonishment.

This is the territory of honesty—the moment before interpretation. Neither writer is yet bargaining; both simply record. Their sentences are blunt, unguarded, and occasionally blasphemous. Lewis’s “cosmic sadist” and Calvin’s “If I still believed in God, I’d say he was cruel” are born of the same despairing need to make sense of senselessness. At this stage, theology and philosophy are irrelevant; what matters is testimony. The reader feels the nearness of truth because both narrators have momentarily stopped trying to explain.

Diverging Paths: Theology vs. Experience

The resemblance ends once each man begins to search for meaning. A Grief Observed is ultimately a theological exercise, however reluctant. Its structure is a pilgrimage back toward faith. Lewis examines his anger, analyzes it, repents of it, and gradually rebuilds the scaffolding of belief. Every question—about suffering, justice, or love—circles back to God’s character. Grief is the experiment; theology is the lab.

A Pleasant Fiction, by contrast, is not framed by the question “Where is God?” because that question has already been exhausted before the book begins. Calvin lives in the aftermath of faith. His task is not to reconcile pain with providence but to live honestly in a world where providence no longer answers. The difference in focus is decisive:

• Lewis writes to defend divine goodness.

• De Lucia writes to defend emotional truth.

That shift in purpose changes the very language of grief. Lewis translates experience into doctrine; Calvin translates it into memory, friendship, and art. Where Clerk looks upward for validation, Calvin looks laterally—to others, to the small continuities that make existence bearable. The sacred has become human.

Two Frameworks, Two Centuries

Part of this divergence is historical. Lewis wrote A Grief Observed eight years before Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s On Death and Dying (1969) introduced the now-ubiquitous stages of grief. Without that psychological vocabulary, Lewis had only theology as an interpretive frame. His analysis of sorrow is pre-Kübler-Ross and pre-existential; the only model available is divine testing and ultimate submission.

A Pleasant Fiction was written in a world where grief has long been studied as process rather than punishment. Its author—Javier De Lucia, who holds a doctorate with a specialization in social psychology—writes from within that modern understanding almost by instinct. The book’s oscillation among anger, depression, reflection, and resignation naturally mirrors the psychological stages Kübler-Ross described, even though it was not written to illustrate them. The framework of faith has been replaced by the framework of human process.

Lewis interprets emotional change as spiritual correction; Calvin recognizes it as emotional rhythm. The difference is not just in what they believe but in what intellectual tools each has to work with.

Submission and Resignation

Both books end in quiet, but the quiet means opposite things.

In the final chapter of A Grief Observed, Lewis decides that his earlier questions were “nonsense questions”—problems that exist only because humans presume to think in categories beyond their reach. God’s silence, he concludes, is not absence but a father’s knowing smile at the child who cannot yet understand. The peace he attains is hierarchical: man below, God above, mystery restored.

Calvin’s stillness at the end of A Pleasant Fiction comes from resignation, not submission. He doesn’t believe the universe owes him an explanation, and he never really looks for one; his peace is not philosophical but experiential: what happened is enough. Meaning is not discovered in theory but recovered in memory, in friendship, in the quiet persistence of love. He is not arguing a case; he is telling the truth as he has lived it. And what endures is continuity: he is his parents’ continuation, he is the living trace of their love. It may not matter to them—they are gone—but it matters to him, and therefore it matters. That modest assertion is his theology of the human.

Two Forms of Courage

In the end, both men are courageous, but in different ways. Lewis’s courage lies in confessing doubt within a religious culture that prized certainty. De Lucia’s lies in finding his only consolation in what remains. A Grief Observed retreats into submission; A Pleasant Fiction settles into the calm of acceptance. One reasserts faith; the other reasserts honesty.

Yet they are not enemies. They are successive steps in the same human project—the attempt to make meaning after loss. Lewis’s book begins the conversation that De Lucia’s continues. If A Grief Observed ends where faith demands silence, A Pleasant Fiction begins where honesty demands speech.

Coda

Over sixty years, the center of consolation has shifted. What was once sought in revelation is now often found in reflection. A Grief Observed turns toward God; A Pleasant Fiction turns toward truth. Each surrenders to something larger than the self. Between them lies a continuum of faith—one divine, one human—and the enduring need to make meaning from loss.

© 2025 Chapelle Dorée Publishing, LLC. All rights reserved. This content may not be reproduced, distributed, or modified without permission.

Chiaroscuro

Both The Wake of Expectations and A Pleasant Fiction are, at heart, studies in chiaroscuro — portraits rendered in light and shadow. The contrast isn’t just aesthetic; it’s emotional, spiritual, human. Each book captures the same terrain but at a different time of day: Wake is the long, golden afternoon of youth, while A Pleasant Fiction unfolds at dusk, when the air cools, and memory begins to outweigh ambition.

In The Wake of Expectations, light dominates. Even when darkness seeps in — heartbreak, regret, loss — it’s filtered through humor, energy, and the reckless optimism of becoming. The book carries the buoyancy of potential, the sense that redemption, or at least understanding, still lies ahead. The shadows exist, but they’re cast by a sun still high in the sky.

A Pleasant Fiction inverts that palette. It begins in darkness — the kind that comes after the light has gone — and lets the reader feel their way toward the glimmers that remain. The humor is drier, the optimism harder earned, but it’s there: found in friendship, in art, in the stubborn will to endure. The two books are mirrors, their tonal balances reversed. Together, they form a single image — a life rendered in opposites.

I was reminded of an interview Anderson Cooper gave on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. He spoke about losing his father as a child and his brother to suicide years later, and about how he never allowed himself to grieve. He said that walling off grief had also walled him off from joy—that it wasn’t until he surrendered to one that he could finally feel the other. That insight struck me as more than psychological truth; it was spiritual. Grief and joy are not opposites—they are twin capacities of the same heart.

That truth defines the purpose of A Pleasant Fiction. The book doesn’t dip its toe into grief or gesture politely toward sorrow; it dives in headfirst. It reaches for the ungraspable, because that reaching is the only way forward. Grief is water—you can’t hold it. You can only submit to it, feel it surround you, and trust that the act of submersion is itself transformative. Only when you resurface can you breathe again. The goal is not to drown; it’s to accept that you cannot stay dry forever. In fact, one can just as easily suffocate on dry land by refusing to face the water at all.

This is not wallowing, nor self-pity. It’s not indulgence or exhibition. It’s expiation—a necessary reckoning with everything that loss takes and everything it leaves behind. The descent is deliberate. It’s the price of feeling fully again, of earning back the capacity for joy, humor, and forgiveness.

If The Wake of Expectations is about learning how to live, A Pleasant Fiction is about learning how to live after. The light in Wake is sunlight; the light in A Pleasant Fiction is refracted, like what filters through deep water—dim but truer for having traveled so far.

Both books, in their different ways, affirm the same truth: that to experience the full range of what it means to be alive, you have to be willing to feel both the darkness and the light, to inhabit both completely. That’s not despair—it’s devotion.

Javier

© 2025 Chapelle Dorée Publishing, LLC. All rights reserved. This content may not be reproduced, distributed, or modified without permission.

For Further Viewing

Anderson Cooper’s conversation with Stephen Colbert, in which Cooper reflects on how suppressing grief also numbed his capacity for joy, powerfully echoes the themes explored in A Pleasant Fiction. It’s a candid discussion about loss, love, and the necessity of feeling deeply in order to live fully.

🎥 Watch: Anderson Cooper on Grief | The Late Show with Stephen Colbert

When You’re Young, You Feel Like the Story Is Your Own

On “nothing happening,” Noah Baumbach, and the illusion of youth.

There are a couple of lines in A Pleasant Fiction—a sentiment in the final chapter, really—that, for me, unlock everything about The Wake of Expectations:

When you’re eighteen, nineteen, or twenty years old, and you’re trying to become an adult, you think about your story as your own…[when you’re older, you realize] It never was.”

That idea reframes not only Calvin’s life, but the design of both books. It’s the key to understanding why Wake feels, to some readers, like “nothing much happens.” Because that’s how youth feels — unfinished, self-contained, endless. It’s not a flaw in the story. It’s the story.

The Illusion of Motion

When Matt McAvoy described The Wake of Expectations as a trilogy that “isn’t really about anything notable…and that’s wonderful,” I smiled. He continued, “it’s about youth.  It’s about fun, coming of age, and kids doing what they do.” That’s exactly what it’s meant to be.

Youth doesn’t feel like a plotted novel. It feels like a long series of conversations and late nights that seem trivial until time turns them into memory.

That’s why Wake moves the way it does — why it drifts, circles, revisits, digresses. It’s not indifference to story; it’s devotion to texture. The narrative rhythm is the emotional rhythm of being twenty-something: waiting for your real life to begin while unknowingly living it.

When you’re that age, you think meaning comes later — after the career, after the relationship, after the dream. The irony is that meaning is already happening, quietly, in the background of all that waiting.

That’s what Wake captures. And that’s why A Pleasant Fiction exists: to show us what all that “nothing” was really about.

The Baumbach Connection

Noah Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming gets this better than almost any other film. On paper, nothing much happens there either — a group of recent graduates linger near campus, too scared to move forward. They talk, they joke, they hover. But that’s the point.

Baumbach understood that inertia is an emotion. It’s not the absence of growth — it’s the fear of growing. The anxiety of realizing that once you step forward, the version of you who belonged to this place disappears.

The Wake of Expectations shares that DNA. It’s not about events; it’s about atmosphere. It’s about the sense of life stretching out forever, even as it quietly narrows. The comedy and nostalgia lull you into thinking you’re reading a (really long) hangout novel. Only later — when A Pleasant Fiction arrives — do you realize that it’s so much more than that. The true weight of a coming-of-age story is that it sets the stage for an entire life. That every individual moment that seems like nothing is actually building toward everything—and everyone.

The Story That Was Never Yours

At the end of A Pleasant Fiction, Calvin muses about how he needed to break away from his parents to “write my own story.” That’s how he saw it when he was younger. That his story was his own — his alone. And the moment he realizes that it never was is the hinge between the two books.

In Wake, he’s living in that illusion: thinking his story belongs to him, that he’s the protagonist of a life defined by friendship, romance, and ambition.

In A Pleasant Fiction, he discovers that his story was never his alone. It was always entangled with others — his parents, his brother, his friends.

That’s adulthood: realizing that your story is just one chapter in a book you didn’t write alone, one leg in a relay that can’t be run by yourself.

And that realization reframes everything readers thought they knew about Wake.

What once seemed like vignettes turn out to be fragments of larger histories — of the people who shaped him, of the family whose sacrifices he couldn’t yet see.

The same scenes are still there, but the meaning has shifted.

Because the story hasn’t changed — the storyteller has.

The Reader’s Journey Mirrors Calvin’s

What I love most is that the reader’s experience mirrors Calvin’s own.

You read Wake thinking you’re just hanging out. Then A Pleasant Fiction pulls the rug out and reveals what you were really witnessing: the foundation of a tragedy, the long prelude to loss.

You’re not supposed to realize that the first time through. You’re supposed to feel the drift, the ease, the false security of youth. Because only after it’s gone can you recognize it for what it was — and by then, it’s too late.

That’s not cynicism. It’s design.

The Two Books as One Life

The Wake of Expectations and A Pleasant Fiction are, in that sense, not separate stories but two perspectives on the same life — first lived, then understood.

• Wake is immediacy.

• APF is insight.

• Wake is the photograph.

• APF is the negative that reveals what was hidden in the light.

Together, they tell the truth about growing up: that you don’t realize what mattered until it’s already behind you.

The Secret of “Nothing Happening”

So when someone says “nothing happens” in The Wake of Expectations, I take it as a compliment.

Because that’s how being young feels — as if you’re waiting for your life to begin, not realizing it’s already happening.

That’s the illusion.
That’s the tragedy.
And that’s the beauty.

When Calvin says, “My life is not mine alone. It never was,” he’s not mourning the loss of his story. He’s finally understanding that life was never something he owned — it was something he shared.

And that’s what all of us realize, eventually: that even our most private memories belong to the people who were there with us. That the story was never ours alone — and that maybe that’s what makes it worth telling.

Javier

© 2025 Chapelle Dorée Publishing, LLC. All rights reserved. This content may not be reproduced, distributed, or modified without permission.

Saint Mom and Sinner Dad

The tragedy of her martyrdom, the quiet triumph of his redemption, and the swing that tied it all together.

There’s a line near the end of A Pleasant Fiction that I still can’t read without pausing.

“I didn’t realize I was so loved,” says Calvin’s mother.
“Did she really not know?” Calvin thinks to himself. “I thought it was obvious.”

Those seven words — and Calvin’s reply — contain an entire lifetime of misunderstanding.

It’s where grief, guilt, and grace finally converge. And it’s where Calvin learns one of the hardest lessons we ever face: that love doesn’t count unless it’s known.

Saint Mom

Calvin calls her Saint Mom, and he means it, but the nickname is both tribute and critique. It’s admiration with a sigh at the end. She was the family’s center of gravity, a woman who carried everyone else’s weight but rarely showed her own. Her love was service, her language was labor. She was always busy proving it, never pausing to feel it.

Her tragedy is that she gave everything except herself. She loved through doing, not through being. And when she finally says, “I didn’t realize I was so loved,” it breaks something open in Calvin. It’s not that he failed to love her — it’s that he assumed she already knew.

But she didn’t.

That’s the quiet heartbreak of sainthood: you can spend your whole life giving love, yet die without realizing how much of it was coming back your way.

Sinner Dad

If his mother’s story is one of devotion misunderstood, his father’s is one of failure reinterpreted. In The Wake of Expectations, Calvin saw him as reckless — a man who gambled away the family fortune on a talentless gold digger. It was his great disillusionment: watching the man he once admired turn into someone he could no longer defend.

But in A Pleasant Fiction, that certainty unravels. Calvin learns the truth: his father hadn’t destroyed everything. He’d protected the family quietly, setting aside a hidden insurance policy they knew nothing about. The supposed ruin was never total — it only looked that way from the outside.

As Ryan puts it,

“I think he wanted to know that we were here for the right reasons. He wanted to be sure we weren’t making appearances just to secure an inheritance…I think that’s why he was so content at the end. He knew that the reason we were there was that we loved him.”

That line reframes everything. His father hadn’t been playing recklessly; he’d been playing with “house money.” He wanted to test not their loyalty, but the purity of their love. And by the end, he was reassured. They stayed.

So when Calvin reflects, “At least one of them knew,” it lands like an act of grace. The flawed man dies with the peace the saint never found.

Swinging and Missing

All of this ties back to the story that opens The Wake of Expectations.

Calvin’s father calls him out on a third strike — frozen, bat on his shoulder — and says the words that will echo for decades:

“You should have swung.”

At the time, it sounds harsh, almost cruel. But later, when Calvin hears his father say in the epilogue, “I couldn’t have made it happen for you any more than I made it happen for [Solitaire],” the full meaning comes through. His father hadn’t been scolding him — he’d been preparing him.

And then comes the realization that reframes his entire music management experiment with Solitaire:

that was his father’s swing.

Solitaire was the grown man’s version of that moment at the plate — his father living by the same advice he gave his son. He took his shot, risked everything…and missed. It was a bad pitch (pun intended), after all. The wrong pitch, for so many reasons.

But he swung.

For years, Calvin saw only the fallout — the financial ruin, the disappointment, the humiliation. But from the distance of adulthood, he can finally see what it was: a man trying not to die standing still. A man who refused to let fear call him out looking.

His father’s flaw wasn’t that he took the swing. It’s that he couldn’t explain why he had to.

The Grace of the Missed Swing

That’s what makes his father’s redemption so quietly profound. He didn’t ask for forgiveness or recognition. He just wanted to know that, even after all his mistakes, his family’s love was still there — unbought, unearned, unshaken.

And by the end, it was.

The hidden insurance policy, the understated inheritance — they become symbolic gestures, not rescues. His father leaves Calvin a gift he no longer needs. It’s a final nod from one man to another: You did it. You took your swing. You didn’t need mine to succeed.

In that sense, A Pleasant Fiction doesn’t end with resolution so much as recognition. The father’s advice, the son’s regret, the saint’s silence — all of it folds into a single truth: love and courage are rarely tidy. They’re often misunderstood, sometimes delayed, but real all the same.

Reconciling the Saint and the Sinner

Calvin’s peace comes from holding both of them together.
His mother’s sanctity becomes the cautionary tale — love unspoken, devotion unacknowledged.
His father’s imperfection becomes the lesson — love disguised as pride, risk mistaken for sin.

She did everything right, yet never felt loved.
He made mistakes, but died knowing he was.
And Calvin, standing between them, becomes the reconciliation of both.

He doesn’t idealize them anymore. He sees them clearly — as people who tried, failed, and loved in their own limited, beautiful ways. He inherits not their wealth or their virtue, but their humanity.

The saint reminds him that love must be spoken.
The sinner reminds him that failure isn’t final.
Both remind him to swing.

Because in the end, that’s the only real inheritance any of us get — the courage to keep stepping up to the plate, knowing we might miss, but doing it anyway.

Javier

© 2025 Chapelle Dorée Publishing, LLC. All rights reserved. This content may not be reproduced, distributed, or modified without permission.

The Five Stages of Grief in A Pleasant Fiction

Note: the following was originally presented in Chapter 36 of Coming of Age, Coming to Terms: A Companion Guide to The Wake of Expectations and A Pleasant Fiction by Javier De Lucia.

The five stages of grief, first introduced by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in On Death and Dying, have become a familiar framework for understanding how people process major loss. Though originally developed in the context of terminal illness, the stages—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—have found broader resonance in the landscape of personal grief. They don’t unfold in neat, sequential order. People cycle through them, revisit them, blend them together. But even with those caveats, the framework offers a helpful way of tracing emotional movement through pain. In A Pleasant Fiction, Calvin McShane’s story provides a vivid, layered example of how these stages might emerge—not in textbook order, but organically, through memory, responsibility, and the attempt to keep living when it feels like everything has collapsed.

Calvin’s experience of grief isn’t limited to a single death or a single loss. Over the course of the novel, he loses his mother, his father, his disabled brother Jared, and his close friend Stan—all within what feels like a single season of life. Compounding these losses are the years of caretaking that preceded them, the complicated memories tied to each person, and the collapse of beliefs that once helped him make sense of suffering. There is no singular “grieving moment” in the novel. Instead, grief pulses through every chapter, every errand, every memory. And the stages—though blurred—are there.

Denial shows up early, though not in the form of disbelief. Calvin doesn’t pretend his parents are alive. He doesn’t deny that his brother is gone. But the numbness is there. In the opening chapter, as people at work casually ask how his summer is going, Calvin is struck by the absurdity of the question. His summer has been defined by death, by loss, by the hollowing out of his family. And yet he finds himself going through the motions—replying politely, fixing the pool, worrying about broken appliances. Denial, in his case, is the practical avoidance of emotional collapse. It’s easier to be annoyed by pool equipment than to face the empty house and the quiet that used to be filled by the sounds of his parents and brother. Even the task of cleaning out the house—ostensibly a simple sorting of belongings—becomes a daily confrontation with loss he is not yet ready to name out loud. Every unopened box, every forgotten item, offers a new opportunity to not feel what he’s feeling.

But that numbness doesn’t hold. Soon enough, Calvin’s frustration leaks through. Anger in A Pleasant Fiction is not volcanic. It doesn’t come in shouting matches or broken dishes. It emerges in weariness, in quiet resentment, in moments where the unfairness of it all becomes too much to bear. Calvin is angry at the world that let Jared suffer, angry at the parents who put so much of their energy into Jared’s care that Calvin often felt invisible, and angry at himself for the things left unsaid or undone. He doesn’t rage, but he seethes—especially when thinking about the emotional cost of years spent managing a home built around one person’s needs. In these moments, he’s not blaming Jared. He’s blaming the structure, the silence, the weight of expectations that left him emotionally stranded. The death of his mother brings another wave of frustration—not only because of her absence, but because she dies never knowing just how deeply she was loved. And that realization cuts Calvin in ways even he doesn’t fully expect.

The bargaining stage appears in Calvin’s tendency to revisit old decisions, to question what might have gone differently. He wonders if his father’s obsession with Solitaire’s music career—an obsession that squandered their lottery winnings—could have been redirected. He asks himself whether they could have done more for Jared. He turns over financial choices, medical decisions, family dynamics, not with the expectation of undoing them, but with the aching wish that maybe, if just one thing had gone differently, everything else might have followed. Bargaining, for Calvin, is the mental spiral that always begins with what if and ends with it wouldn’t have mattered, would it? It’s a way of pretending—briefly—that the story might have had another ending.

But it’s depression that settles in deepest. If A Pleasant Fiction has a dominant emotional texture, it’s this: the still, heavy sorrow of realizing that no amount of logic, reflection, or creative reframing will bring back the people who are gone. Calvin’s loss is not abstract. It’s tangible. It lives in the clothes he sorts through, in the silence of the rooms he used to avoid, in the echo of his brother’s cries. And in Chapter 9, as he begins to question not just what he’s lost but the very foundations of belief that once gave him comfort, the grief sharpens into despair. Calvin doesn’t just lose his family—he loses the God who was supposed to be watching over them. His anger at the universe deepens into disillusionment. And in the aftermath of multiple miscarriages and a painful pregnancy termination, he finds himself unable to pray, unable to pretend, unable to make sense of a world that feels increasingly cruel. The depression is not just sadness. It is theological. Existential. A question that refuses to be answered.

But eventually, in quiet, unsteady ways, acceptance begins to take root. Not as a victory. Not as closure. But as an acknowledgment: This is my life now. Calvin doesn’t emerge triumphant. He emerges tired. But still standing. In the final chapters, he begins to recognize what remains—his wife, his son, his friendships, his writing. He’s not whole. He never will be. But he is, for the first time, able to look around and see something worth holding on to. The moments with Dani, with Audrey, even the strange peace he finds in his dreams of his family—all of it speaks to a man who is learning how to live again, even if the version of life he now leads bears little resemblance to the one he imagined.

The five stages of grief are not presented as chapters in the book. Calvin doesn’t label them. He doesn’t map his feelings to a psychological model. But they are there, humming beneath the surface of his story. And more importantly, they are not neatly resolved. Just as Kübler-Ross herself later emphasized, the stages aren’t a ladder you climb or a finish line you reach. They are tides. They return.

In A Pleasant Fiction, grief is not an event—it’s an atmosphere. Calvin breathes it in and out. He learns to move through it. And in doing so, he becomes something more complex than a grieving son or a mourning brother. He becomes a man who understands that loss never really goes away. It just changes shape. And so do we.

Coming of Age, Coming to Terms can be downloaded for free here.

A Pleasant Fiction and Manchester by the Sea: Grief in the Mundane

Spoiler Warning: The reflections below discuss key plot points from both A Pleasant Fiction and Manchester by the Sea, including their endings. If you haven’t finished either and want to experience them without knowing where they lead, you may want to stop here and return later.

I was looking for films that might have a similar energy to A Pleasant Fiction, and someone suggested Manchester by the Sea. Structurally, I can see why. Both are stories about grief told through a fractured lens, where past and present blur together and the weight of loss is carried as much in small, ordinary tasks as in dramatic moments.

The Mundane as the Stage for Grief

One of the things Manchester by the Sea does brilliantly is highlight the banal logistics of death: morgue visits, coffin selection, funeral arrangements, even the absurdity of trying to bury someone in New England’s frozen ground. The film lingers on these details, reminding us that grief isn’t cinematic melodrama. It’s paperwork, phone calls, casseroles, and neighbors who don’t know what to say.

A Pleasant Fiction shares that lens. Calvin’s grief is punctuated not by sweeping set-pieces but by broken dishwashers, pool maintenance, and black trash bags filled with the remnants of a family’s life. The ordinary becomes surreal, freighted with memory. The humdrum details of daily existence become the very canvas upon which grief is painted.

Guilt vs. Responsibility

Where the two works diverge most sharply is in the emotional register. In Manchester, Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck) is hollowed out by guilt. He doesn’t just grieve; he blames himself. His tragedy is so great that responsibility feels unbearable. That’s why his arc bends toward avoidance — trying to hand off guardianship, trying to escape the weight of living with what he’s done.

Calvin’s burden in A Pleasant Fiction is different. He never runs from responsibility, even though he resents it. He becomes Jared’s guardian. He tends to his ailing father. He cleans out the family home, even when left to do it alone. His suffering isn’t born of guilt but of endurance — the exhaustion of carrying too much for too long. Where Lee’s grief freezes him, Calvin’s drives him forward, jaggedly, with sarcasm and persistence.

The Emotional Vibe

This difference in foundation shifts the entire emotional atmosphere. Manchester is about paralysis — grief plus guilt producing a frozen, bleak stillness. A Pleasant Fiction, though equally steeped in tragedy, is alive with motion. Calvin’s sardonic humor, his restlessness, even his obsessive focus on minutiae reveal a man still searching for meaning, not surrendering to despair.

That’s why I sometimes bristle when I see readers or reviewers stop in the darkness of the first half of A Pleasant Fiction and characterize it as self-pitying or hopeless. To me, that suggests they haven’t finished the journey. Because the heartbeat of the book is not wallowing. It’s reclamation. The back half is about friendship, forgiveness, and finding a way forward. The story doesn’t erase grief — but it refuses to end there. The book forces you to sit in the discomfort of grief, yes. But then it asks you to get up and move.

Reclaiming Meaning

It’s important to note that A Pleasant Fiction doesn’t close with Calvin striding into a new life. Its ending is subtler, and perhaps braver: a commitment to move forward, even if the steps remain untaken. By contrast, Lee in Manchester by the Sea accepts that he cannot overcome his guilt enough to give Patrick what he truly wants. Instead, he decides to do what he can — what he is capable of — and that compromise defines his form of redemption. Calvin’s path is different. He doesn’t have the luxury of choice. The responsibilities are his, and he has to complete them, no matter how heavy. And when he reaches the point where it’s clear he might break under the weight, help arrives — first from unexpected places, but ultimately from the one person he knows he can always count on: Ben.

That’s the essence of what sets A Pleasant Fiction apart. It acknowledges grief fully while also insisting on responsibility, connection, and the reclamation of meaning. It allows space for humor without being a comedy, and it finds dignity in the act of enduring and embracing grief rather than in escaping or overcoming it. In that sense, it charts its own path — one defined not by guilt or avoidance, but by persistence and love in the aftermath of loss.

Javier

© 2025 Chapelle Dorée Publishing, LLC. All rights reserved. This content may not be reproduced, distributed, or modified without permission.

🎬 For Further Viewing

If you want to see the visual tone and emotional texture behind Manchester by the Sea, check out the trailer here:
Watch the Manchester by the Sea Trailer

In Praise of a Noble Failure

I love Meet Joe Black. Absolutely love it.

Yes, the movie where Brad Pitt plays Death. Yes, the one with the viral car accident. Yes, the one critics still dismiss as long, bloated, and self-indulgent.

For many, it was a fiasco. For me — and for its cult following that’s only grown with time — it’s something else entirely. Meditative. Patient. Willing to linger in moments others would cut, precisely because those moments matter.

I once sang its praises to my sister-in-law. When I finally stopped, she just said:

“I hate that movie. So long. So boring.”

And that’s the paradox. To some, interminable. To others, transcendent.

Defining Failure

By Hollywood’s ledger, Meet Joe Black was a failure. A $90 million prestige picture that made less than half that domestically. Its opening weekend propped up by Star Wars fans who walked out after the trailer.

But the numbers don’t matter anymore. What endures is Martin Brest’s willingness to follow his vision. He knew how to make a hit — Scent of a Woman proved that. Instead, he made something slower, stranger, and spiritually ambitious. If success is box office, yes, he failed. If success is realizing a singular vision, no, he didn’t.

That distinction matters for my own work, too.

The Wake Parallel

The Wake of Expectations isn’t a “noble failure.” Not yet, anyway. Sales haven’t been spectacular, but it’s gotten its flowers. (Thank you again, Maxy Awards!)

But in the sense that it refuses to do what a “well-written” book is supposed to do, then yes, it fails — deliberately.

The “plot” sets up in part one and only returns at the very end. The middle — long stretches of lived life, frustrations, humiliations, diversions — is the point. Just as Meet Joe Black’s corporate subplot reframes Bill Parrish’s final stand, those digressions build the architecture of Calvin’s motivation. The middle is what makes the end matter.

I knew that when I wrote it. I knew I was flouting convention. And I did it anyway.

Too long. Too dense. Too crass.

It wasn’t designed to succeed on anyone’s terms but my own.

Marketability vs. Vision

If I wanted to maximize marketability, I never would have written Wake. I’d have written a trope-heavy romantasy or some other crowd-pleaser. But that was never the goal.

The goal was to write the book I needed to write. Long. Messy. Raunchy. Reflective. Literature disguised as slice-of-life comedy.

And here’s the irony: the very qualities that count against Wake in some contests are what set it apart in others. It’s been ignored in places that prize genre fit or commercial polish. But then came the Maxys — where what others called flaws were recognized as features. That’s when I knew: there are readers who see the book as I meant it.

The Lineage of Noble Failures

That’s why I see Wake in the lineage of misunderstood works that dared to break form.

Moby-Dick. (Yeah, I said it!) Longer than Wake. Dismissed in its time as tedious and self-indulgent. Sales flopped, critics mocked, and Melville died in obscurity. Only later did it emerge as the American novel.

Meet Joe Black. A Hollywood “disaster” in 1998. Too long, too slow, too indulgent. And yet, with time, it endured. It resonates with those willing to sit with it.

The Wake of Expectations. Refuses to obey convention. Refuses to be tidy, efficient, or what a debut novel is “supposed” to be. And that’s precisely what makes it mine.

No Mistake

Some would say — as they do about Brest’s film — that choosing vision over convention was a mistake. But that assumes the wrong objective.

If the goal is sales, broad market fit, or box office, then sure, it looks like failure. But if the goal is to make the work only you could make, then it’s no mistake at all.

That’s what connects Meet Joe Black, The Wake of Expectations, and yes, Moby-Dick in Melville’s day. Each flouts convention. Each risks dismissal. And each, in its own way, lingers.

The Noble Contradiction

So maybe “noble failure” isn’t the right phrase for Wake. It hasn’t failed. (And unlike Brest, I’m not spending anyone else’s money, so I have every right to “fail” financially, if it does.) But it does belong to that tradition of works that risk failure — that resist the safe choice, that reject the formula, that insist on being slower, stranger, harder than the market wants.

That’s the noble part.

Of course, I hope Wake proves more successful than Meet Joe Black. Who wouldn’t? But by the time the jury is fully out, I’ll be on to the fourth book anyway.

That’s the beauty. The work stands. The writing keeps moving. Success, failure, or noble contradiction — the next story is already waiting.

Javier

© 2025 Chapelle Dorée Publishing, LLC. All rights reserved. This content may not be reproduced, distributed, or modified without permission.

🎬 For Further Viewing

If you’re interested in a deeper look at the film’s reception, this video essay is worth watching:
Why Meet Joe Black Failed But Became a Cult Classic

Ben the Iron Safe, Calvin the Open Book: What Their Friendship Says About Men and Grief

One of the most striking contrasts between The Wake of Expectations and A Pleasant Fiction comes through two self-contained lines that, taken together, speak volumes. In Wake, Calvin describes his friend Ben as “an iron safe.” In APF, he describes himself as “an open book.” On the surface, these are passing character sketches, almost throwaway remarks. But read side by side, they capture something profound about the two men — not just as individuals, but as archetypes of how men cope with grief and tragedy.

The Iron Safe and the Open Book

Calvin is contemporary masculinity personified: emotionally open, introspective, sometimes self-absorbed, but always willing to put his inner life into words. He processes grief through narration, memory, humor, and confrontation. He writes it, talks it, wrestles with it in the open.

Ben, by contrast, is traditional masculinity: stoic, self-sufficient, carrying burdens silently. He went through his own tragedy years earlier, but he never asked for help. He simply bore it, locked it inside. He’s the iron safe — closed, weighty, and impenetrable.

Neither approach is “better” or “worse.” They’re two ways of surviving. But they rarely coexist in harmony — except here, in this friendship.

A Steadfast, Asymmetrical Bond

Most of Calvin’s relationships are messy. With Jake or Dani or even his parents, there’s tension, imbalance, unresolved conflict. Absence breeds doubt. Every interaction feels like work — apologizing, interpreting, caretaking. At least to Calvin, it always feels like he’s giving as much or more than he receives.

Ben is different. The asymmetry leans the other way. His generosity means Calvin can lean without worrying about holding anything up in return. Their bond isn’t complicated or negotiated; it just exists. Steadfast, unquestioned. It’s one of the few relationships in Calvin’s life that feels light rather than heavy.

Formal Presence vs. Personal Presence

Ben does appear earlier in A Pleasant Fiction — at the funerals, naturally, and again in Chapter 10 when the old group comes together. But those appearances are formal. They’re part of the expected rituals of community and friendship. Ben is there, but so is everyone else.

It isn’t until the final clean-out of Calvin’s family home that Ben truly shows up. This time it isn’t about social obligation or group loyalty. It’s just the two of them. Calvin, exhausted, standing in the emptied house, and Ben, quietly beside him. No audience. No fanfare. Just presence.

That shift — from formal to personal — is what gives the moment its quiet power. It’s the difference between being there because you’re supposed to and being there because you choose to. And Ben chooses Calvin.

The Iron Safe Opens, Just a Crack

The irony is that Calvin doesn’t really know how to be there for Ben. The iron safe never opens. Ben’s silence about his own grief keeps Calvin on the outside. But when Calvin reaches his breaking point, he knows how to ask. And because he asks, Ben knows exactly what to do.

That final scene — Ben standing with Calvin to close the door of the family home — is the most intimate act of their friendship. Not because of words spoken or confessions made, but because of what’s implied: when it matters most, the iron safe doesn’t need to unlock itself. It only needs to hold steady.

What It Says About Male Friendship

Calvin and Ben embody two poles of masculinity: one verbose and raw, the other silent and stoic. Yet their bond shows that difference doesn’t have to mean distance. A friendship can be asymmetrical and still steadfast. It can thrive not on constant presence, but on unquestioned reliability.

In a book full of complicated, exhausting relationships, Ben is the rare exception — the friend whose presence is powerful even in his absence, the one who shows up at the end not because duty demands it but because love does.

Sometimes grief needs an open book. Sometimes it needs an iron safe. And sometimes, if you’re lucky, it gets both.

Javier

© 2025 Chapelle Dorée Publishing, LLC. All rights reserved. This content may not be reproduced, distributed, or modified without permission.

On Being Defined by the Company You Keep

There’s a line I keep circling back to lately: “You’re defined by the company you keep.” I don’t know who first said it, but the thought has been bouncing around my head ever since this year’s award results started rolling in.

When The Wake of Expectations was named Book of the Year at the 2025 Maxy Awards, I was stunned. Not because I doubt the work, but because, like a lot of writers, I sometimes wrestle with a quieter, harder question:

Am I any good at this?

That question never really goes away. It just changes shape.

The Maxy Awards: A Surprising Cohort

When the announcement came, I looked through the other winners and finalists. And what struck me wasn’t pride so much as perspective. These weren’t random names pulled from a hat:

• Dan Lawton won the Thriller category and previously earned a Kirkus Best Indie Book of 2024 for another title — a major accomplishment.

• Michael J. Bowler took Middle Grade & YA, carrying a Readers’ Favorite Bronze Medal, a Hollywood Book Festival award, and a strong indie catalog.

• Michelle Medlock Adams, who won for Children’s, already had both a Purple Dragonfly Award and the Golden Scroll Children’s Book of the Year.

These aren’t just good books. These are authors consistently recognized by thoughtful readers, critics, and juries alike. To see my name next to theirs was humbling.

And then, looking beyond this year, I saw the lineage of past Maxy Book of the Year winners — a short list of only nine titles — and noticed something else:

• Managed Care (2019) by Joe Barrett also picked up a PenCraft Award and an Eric Hoffer Honorable Mention.

• Maud’s Circus (2022) by Michelle Rene was another standout — and when I dug deeper into her background, I realized just how decorated she is:

  • Her novel Hour Glass won Chanticleer Review’s Best Book of the Year in 2018.

  • Her novella Tattoo was a Foreword INDIES finalist for fantasy.

  • Her historical novella The Dodo Knight placed as a Next Gen Indie Book Awards finalist.

  • Her YA historical fantasy Manufactured Witches won the OZMA Award for fantasy, the Discovery Award from the Writer's League of Texas, and was named Texas’s Best YA Novel of 2019 by the Indie Author Project.

When you look at that résumé, it redefines what it means to share this designation with her. These aren’t just Maxy winners. These are authors shaping the indie landscape across multiple award ecosystems.

Being on that list doesn’t answer the question “Do I belong here?”

But it does reframe it: Look at the company I’m keeping.

Readers’ Favorite and the Fiction–Realistic Cluster

I felt the same perspective shift when A Pleasant Fiction earned a Bronze Medal in Readers’ Favorite’s Fiction–Realistic category.

The grouping around APF was stacked:

• Francine Falk-Allen’s Wolff in the Family — an intimate memoir-hybrid exploring love, family, and identity. Falk-Allen’s earlier memoirs received Kirkus Stars and landed on Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of the Year lists, which is rarefied company in indie publishing.

• Elias Axel’s Promising Young Man, which earned a Silver Medal at Readers’ Favorite, was also a BookLife Prize Finalist and carries a Kirkus “Get It” recommendation — a rare endorsement reserved for books Kirkus believes deserve wide attention. (And like A Pleasant Fiction, winner of multiple Firebird International Book Awards, too.)

Seeing A Pleasant Fiction side by side with books like those gives that single bronze medal weight beyond the badge itself. It’s not just about “placing” in a category — it’s about realizing who else was there with you.

The Company You Keep

If there’s a lesson in all of this, it’s that awards don’t make the writer. They never could.

But when you’re deep in the work, questioning yourself — and the critic inside whispers, “Are you enough?” — it helps to look around and notice the company you’re keeping. To see yourself alongside writers you respect, admire, and want to celebrate.

I don’t want to measure success by medals or lists. But I also can’t ignore what it means to share a stage, a table of contents, or even just a digital index with writers doing such remarkable work.

It doesn’t answer the question “Am I any good at this?”
But it does offer a hint: maybe I’m at least headed in the right direction.

And for now, that’s enough.

Closing Thought

We spend so much time chasing imagined versions of success — bestseller lists, viral posts, movie deals — that it’s easy to miss the quieter, truer markers of progress.

I’ve come to think one of the clearest signals is this:

Look at the company you keep.

If you find yourself among thoughtful, hardworking, relentlessly creative peers — people pushing the craft forward in their own ways — then maybe, just maybe, you’re doing okay.

I’m grateful to be in this company. Truly.

Javier

© 2025 Chapelle Dorée Publishing, LLC. All rights reserved. This content may not be reproduced, distributed, or modified without permission.