Before and After: How Looking for Alaska and My Duology Explore Coming of Age and Loss from Opposite Ends of Life
⚠️ Mild Spoiler Warning:
This post discusses the themes and structure of Looking for Alaska and how they relate to my duology. I won’t reveal major plot points, but if you prefer to go in completely blind, you may want to read the book first.
A friend recently suggested that I might enjoy John Green’s Looking for Alaska because they thought it had some things in common with my own work. I finally picked it up, and they were right — I really enjoyed it. It got me thinking about the relationship between Green’s novel and my duology (The Wake of Expectations and A Pleasant Fiction), and why readers who connected with Looking for Alaska might also find something meaningful in my books.
Both works are concerned with friendship, identity, and loss, but they approach these themes from different stages of life. Looking for Alaska famously uses its “Before” and “After” structure to capture the intensity of youth and the tragedy of losing someone when you’re still becoming yourself. My duology operates in a similar emotional space but stretches it across a broader canvas: the energy, humor, and complications of friendship in The Wake of Expectations, and then the weight of grief and meaning-making in A Pleasant Fiction — not as teenagers, but as adults grappling with the losses that come later in life.
The “Before” Section and The Wake of Expectations
In Looking for Alaska, the “Before” chapters are the heart of the coming-of-age experience: messy, complicated, and charged with possibility. My first novel, The Wake of Expectations, lives fully inside that same energy — but it stretches it across a much broader canvas.
Calvin McShane, my protagonist, grows up navigating the push and pull of a close-knit friend group, wrestling with belonging, loyalty, and the desires that shape identity. But where Green condenses this formative stage into a few hundred pages, The Wake of Expectations lingers. At nearly 600 pages, it creates space for the reader to sit inside the friendships, the heartbreaks, and the choices that echo across a lifetime. The size is deliberate — longer not because the story meanders, but because that period of life feels massive when you’re living it.
The “After” Section and A Pleasant Fiction
Where Looking for Alaska’s “After” focuses on a single devastating moment — the loss of a friend while you’re still young — A Pleasant Fiction takes the long view. Here, Calvin faces a different kind of grief: the loss of family, the unraveling of old certainties, and the painful work of redefining who you are when so many of the anchors you’ve relied on are gone.
It’s not a mirror of Green’s narrative — it’s a counterpoint. Instead of circling around one tragedy, A Pleasant Fiction interweaves multiple losses across time, memory, and meaning. Where Looking for Alaska leaves its characters standing at the threshold of adulthood, my duology asks: What happens when you’ve crossed it? How do the friendships and formative choices of your youth echo in the quieter, more complicated griefs of midlife?
Why Fans of Looking for Alaska Might Connect with My Books
At their core, both works are about connection — how friendships shape us, how love leaves marks, and how loss redefines the way we see ourselves. But while Looking for Alaska captures a singular, explosive coming-of-age moment, my duology builds a layered emotional arc across two novels and two stages of life:
If you loved the group dynamics, banter, and subtle power shifts in Alaska’s “Before,” you’ll find echoes of that energy in The Wake of Expectations.
If you were moved by the sense of searching, wondering, and grappling with mortality in Alaska’s “After,” A Pleasant Fiction carries that exploration forward into adulthood — where grief and meaning-making become more complex, but no less urgent.
And if you’ve ever wondered how the choices you made at 17 reverberate at 40, my duology lives in that space.
An Invitation
I love Looking for Alaska. It was one of the first novels to show an entire generation that young adult fiction could be messy, funny, heartbreaking, and deeply thoughtful all at once. My hope is that readers who connected with its emotional honesty will find something familiar — and something new — in The Wake of Expectations and A Pleasant Fiction.
If Looking for Alaska is the book about the firework moment that cracks your world open, my duology explores the slow burn of what comes after: growing up, falling short, holding on, and learning — again and again — what it means to love and lose.
P.S. on the Hulu Series & Adaptation Dreams
I also watched the eight-episode Hulu adaptation of Looking for Alaska, and I thought it was brilliant. Adapting it as a limited series instead of a single movie gave the story the space it needed to breathe, and it captured the tone and emotional weight of the book beautifully.
I’m actively pushing The Wake of Expectations toward adaptation as well, but its scope is much bigger. Where Looking for Alaska fits perfectly into eight episodes, Wake would need a multi-season arc to fully explore the friendships, detours, and long-form emotional journey at its heart. The book was written with television in mind — the sprawling narrative and interwoven character arcs were always designed to shine in an episodic format.
Javier
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