Catwalk Bed Hair and Cultivated Roots
On the Garden of Wake, the Bloom of Fiction, and the Companion That Follows
In his review of The Age of Unbecoming (the third volume in the serialized presentation of The Wake of Expectations), Matt McAvoy described my writing style as “catwalk bed hair”—an image that still makes me smile. It’s a compliment, but also a gentle exposure: he’s saying that the prose seems casual and unstructured, but clearly isn’t. That there’s deliberate styling behind the seeming mess. That the hair doesn’t fall that way by accident.
It’s an apt metaphor, and not just for the style—but for the structure beneath The Wake of Expectations and the larger project it initiated.
The Wake of Expectations didn’t arrive in a single stroke. It grew slowly—over years, even decades. And I don’t mean that I worked on it every day for twenty years. I mean it grew like something alive: dormant at times, flowering at others, sending roots deeper into things I hadn’t yet processed. As I described in my earlier post, it wasn’t a house I designed and built. It was a tree I planted, then lived with. It changed as I changed.
Wake wasn’t complete when I finished it. Not really. It wasn’t complete until A Pleasant Fiction bloomed.
That book—the so-called offshoot—grew faster. It sprouted from the same root system but flowered differently. And its arrival transformed the entire landscape. If Wake is the patient tree and Fiction the sudden blossom, then the combined effect turned the backyard into something more like a botanical garden. The second book gave the first its shape. Its meaning. Its context.
And that’s what Coming of Age, Coming to Terms is about.
It’s not a manual. It’s not a blueprint. It’s more like a walk through the garden with the person who planted it. The guide doesn’t pretend to explain everything, nor to claim that every flower grew exactly where or how it was intended. But it tries to show what’s there. What grew wild. What was pruned. What may have been overlooked—and what has quietly taken root.
The companion doesn’t just reflect on the content of the books. It reflects on the process. On the interplay between conscious and unconscious creation. On how a narrative can keep revealing things to the author long after it’s written. And on how, sometimes, the work knows more than you do.
That’s what I hope readers of the companion will experience. Not just behind-the-scenes notes, or analytical essays—but a sense that these books were part of something living. Something that grew slowly, then all at once. Something that may look like bedhair, but that carries the quiet discipline of cultivation.
And for those who’ve walked through this literary garden already, I hope the companion offers a reason to return. Maybe to notice something new. Or to realize that what looked like chaos was, all along, in bloom.
Javier
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Further Reading
For additional context on the origin of the “catwalk bed hair” comment and its role in shaping this essay, you can read Matt McAvoy’s full review of The Age of Unbecoming here:
🔗 The Age of Unbecoming – Matt McAvoy Reviews
McAvoy’s phrase—describing the deceptive ease of the prose—helped inspire the central metaphor of this post. His thoughtful engagement with the work continues to shape how I reflect on my own process.
