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

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