Writing My Life Into the Box

When I talk about The Wake of Expectations, I often describe it as a long, slow cultivation—something organic, unpredictable, and expansive. It grew in layers, revealing new branches over the years as I returned to it, pruned it, and gave it space to become what it needed to be. But when I speak about A Pleasant Fiction, the relationship is different. It’s no longer just a tree in a garden. It’s something more refined—more deliberate. Not artificial, but curated. The difference lies in origin. Wake is emotional truth told through fiction. APF is lived experience, written into fiction. And that changes everything.

In my interview with Davona on my second (simulated) podcast appearance, I talked about autofiction as a form of liberation. Wake is not memoir. It’s not autobiography. The gap between reality and the page is significant—and that’s intentional. I needed fiction to create a safe space for honesty. The act of fictionalizing gave me the distance to explore raw emotions and unresolved tensions. It freed me from the obligation of strict accuracy and allowed me to reach for something deeper than mere fact: emotional truth.

But A Pleasant Fiction is a different animal. It began as memoir. It was, quite literally, a documentation of my grief. Of my brother’s death. Of my parents’ absence. Of my loss of faith, and my stumbling return to meaning through friendship, art, and memory. It wasn’t until later that I realized I needed to put that story into the box—the fictional universe I had already built in Wake. Because only then could I really see it clearly.

That box—the fictional world of Calvin McShane—isn’t just a setting. It’s a container. It’s the parallel universe where my life gets refracted, where experience becomes story, and where pain can be shaped into something meaningful. And so, A Pleasant Fiction became Calvin’s memoir. Not mine. But in transforming it into his, I reclaimed my own.

That transformation wasn’t just literary. It was existential.

Through Calvin, I could revisit moments I hadn’t fully processed. I could let my characters voice things I hadn’t been able to say aloud. I could reframe events not to change their outcome, but to change my relationship to them. The story didn’t just reveal things about the characters—it revealed things about me. About how I grieve. About what I believe. About what I regret. And about what I still hold onto.

This is the paradox of autofiction: that by giving yourself permission to invent, you get closer to the truth. That by stepping into a fictional frame, you can finally look reality in the eye.

I said in the Logan podcast that sometimes the work reveals things to you—not because you planned them, but because they were there all along, buried in the narrative, waiting to be uncovered. Wake was a conversation between my conscious and unconscious mind. A Pleasant Fiction was something else: it was a reckoning. A moment where fiction and memoir met—not to blur the line, but to illuminate it.

What started as grief became narrative. What began as pain became perspective. And what had once felt like a private ache became a shared human story—one told in the voice of a fictional character, inside a fictional world, but anchored in something real.

This is what I mean when I say I put my life into the box. Not to hide it. But to preserve it. To shape it. To understand it.

And maybe, in doing so, to help someone else do the same.

Javier

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