Phone calls from the heavens always seem to happen at home.

Maybe fate likes to play with the dynamics, the tension that stretches out between each earth-changing ring of the telephone, or in the case of William Miller, the protagonist of Cameron Crowe’s semi-autobiographical film Almost Famous (2000), home might just be the easiest place for fate to reach you when you’re 15. I know that was certainly the case for me.

William is in his room, at his typewriter, when he gets the call from Ben Fong-Torres (Terry Chen), editor of Rolling Stone magazine. His journey is already underway by this point. He’s already met Penny Lane (Kate Hudson), who will be his confidante and object of affection, and he’s already met Stillwater, the up-and-coming rock band who will come to rely on William almost as much as he will rely on them. Yet it is with this call that William’s fate changes. No longer is he just a fifteen-year-old senior in high school, on the fast track to being the youngest lawyer in the country. No longer will he just be a wannabe rock writer. He’s officially a journalist, invited to watch over the brewing chaos that comes with a band on the rise, and all he had to do was lie about his age.

In an instant, William gets to be cool. 

In retrospect, my call was not nearly as exciting. However, without that cellular building block, I never would have had the chance to meet my various Fong-Torres equivalents. I was fourteen, pacing back and forth on a faded carpet in the entryway of my childhood home. I was waiting for my phone call, and I knew the potential reality shifts that it could possess if I could just keep my act in order. Were everything to go right, by the time I’d hang up, I’d be on the fast track for a publication of my own. My first novel would hit the shelves of bookstores across the US, right alongside all the books that made me want to be an author in the first place. In an instant, I would be cool too. 

There is a scene in Almost Famous where Penny Lane asks William, “How old are we really?” This is before his call with Ben Fong-Torres, when William is writing his first piece on Stillwater for Creem, and this is the first real conversation the pair have after their introduction. She asks how old he is; he says, “Eighteen”; she says, “Me too.” She is lying just as much as he is and she knows it, that’s what leads her to keep pressing until he eventually confesses that he is only fifteen. 

I find myself thinking of this scene as I attempt to replay the circumstances of my phone call. I know I’m asked if I’m eighteen. It’s a mere clarification on their end that I’m now certain that they asked because I sounded like, well, a fourteen-year-old who didn’t think to drop my voice an octave like William, not that that would have helped me much. From what I recall, there is a moment I pause, where I attempt to think through the weight of this lie, this life-changing decision. 

Eventually I respond, “Of course.” 

For various reasons— mainly due to the legitimacy, or lack thereof, of the publisher—I was not a published author at the age of fourteen. In fact, my first work of fiction wouldn’t come until this past February, when DreamWorldGirl Zine published my first short story, An Exclusive Story With The Monster Herself. While that call might not have changed my life instantaneously, it did alter the path I was on. What felt like rejection only dug me deeper into my passions, just like how the wake of his sister Anita (Zooey Deschanel)’s exodus to become a flight attendant is what drove William towards the music he quickly grew to love. I joined the Teen Advisory Board run by my local independent bookstore and their podcast, a show called On The Shelf. 

My first official episode was an interview and came about not too dissimilarly from William’s first encounter with Stillwater. 

Before getting his chance with Rolling Stone, William tracks down Lester Bangs (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the then real-life editor of Creem magazine, bagging himself his first real assignment: 1000 words on Black Sabbath. He has his first in, his first big chance, to make it as a rock writer, yet no one will let him get backstage to meet the band. Thinking his career is over before it has even begun, William is sent to wait with the groupies where he meets Penny Lane. Yet even that is a dead end when she is pulled backstage with her friends, yelling promises over her shoulder that she will try to get him in too. So now, out of options but with little desire to return home in defeat, he runs into Stillwater, Black Sabbath’s opening act and invents an “in” for himself. 

In the years before I joined On The Shelf, I had been trying to make connections within the publishing world. I saw my access to authors as a way for me to create my own “in.” I was, at the time, an Instagram mutual with a local indie author, and invited her onto the show. It’s only in leaving the designated path that  William and I found our initial successes, the moments that would lead us to bigger and better bylines and opportunities. 

I admire my youthful tenacity, and my drive to be a published author, then an interviewer/podcaster, but like with William’s journey, there is something darker lying beneath the surface. We both felt this insatiable need to grow up before our time, for our youth to be in some way linked to our success which would then position us as cool. 

Like William, I have long been the youngest in the room with a spring birthday that always seems to land within the deepest doldrums of final exams. I’m also the youngest of my generation within my extended family by at least a decade, floating alone on my Gen Z island between my Millennial cousins and their Gen Alpha children. Despite my youth, I was typically labeled as “mature for my age,” or the quiet kid the “bad” ones would be sat next to on the seating charts in the hopes that my quiet would rub off on them— in reality, this ploy would typically just make me talkative.

Towards the end of the film, Penny Lane tells William that he is “too sweet for rock and roll.” They are in the midst of an argument, and William is attempting to convince Penny not to follow the band to New York, that Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup), the guitarist for Stillwater whom Penny is in love with, sold her to another band for a case of beer. In the build-up to this moment, William seems to transcend his youth: he was part of the group, he had, despite warnings from Lester Bangs, become “friends with the rock stars.” But one argument with Penny strips all of that away, and William understands that despite his best efforts, he is still the child he always was and that they never truly saw him as an equal, like he thought. It is at this point that he begins to understand that there are no true shortcuts for growing up.

I only watched Almost Famous for the first time this past winter, after learning that my parents had gotten us all tickets to see the band Heart in April. As I sat curled up on the couch during my last few months of being a teenager, letting the wonderful music of Heart’s Nancy Wilson wash over me, body and soul, I had the sinking feeling that rather than simply observing Crowe’s rosy recreation of the 1970s, I was looking back into my own young adulthood. I realized that for the past several years I had been living out a life adjacent to that of William Miller, without even knowing it. 

Now that I am twenty, I can’t help but see the parallels between my own adolescence and that of the plot of one of my new favorite films. I feel oddly qualified to talk about the film and how it captures the tricky complexity of wanting to grow up while not having a clue about what adulthood truly is. In the years since that first interview, I’ve interviewed hundreds of authors, forged connections with members of almost all five big publishing houses, and became the host of the show that gave me my start. I’m grateful for all of it, but I do sometimes wonder what would have become of me had I not felt the urge to make something of myself as a child and had I not grown so intoxicated by the allure of adulthood, or had I not picked up the phone.