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

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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