Still Arriving

From four-time Oscar-nominated filmmaker Noah Baumbach—director and writer of beloved movies like The Squid and the Whale, Frances Ha, and Marriage Story—comes the viral commencement address he delivered to the Vassar Class of 2026 on resilience, humility, and the joys of beginning “the amazing walk into the rest of your life.”

The summer after Noah Baumbach’s graduation from Vassar College, he received a package in the mail containing the play he had sent to a well-known theater producer in New York, along with a letter. “Simply stated,” began said letter. “Your play doesn’t work. It fails on multiple levels.” It was a moment of pure and simple rejection, a knife to the heart of the aspiring writer—in an alternate life, that would have been the end of Baumbach’s career.

Instead, it was just beginning.

With Baumbach’s signature wit and intelligence, he recounts the months and years following this rejection, from working on his first feature film, Kicking and Screaming, with his senior year roommates to becoming one of the most well-known filmmakers in Hollywood, and, eventually, the commencement speaker for the Vassar Class of 2026. This is a poignant, heartfelt celebration of what matters—of loving what you do, cherishing the relationships you make along the way, and learning to find meaning in mistakes—and a reminder that “the rejection is never the final word. Neither is the triumph.”

Still Arriving is an indelible love letter to the messiness of life, a reaffirmation that the limits of a person’s potential are inscribed only by their imagination, and a testament to life’s voyage, to the notion that “we’re always arriving which is another way of saying we never arrive.”