Earning my PhD at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, I was lucky enough to land my first job at Harvard University, which forms the backdrop for the second stage of Newt’s realization of his mysterious expectations, once he graduates from a mythic “Phipps” Academy—an imaginary prep school that is culled from many friends’ stories of their halcyon years at Phillips Andover. It was only years later, teaching Great Expectations to one of my English classes at University of Southern California while reading Howards End in tandem with Zadie Smith’s marvelous invocation of Forster ‘s novel in On Beauty, that I had my “eureka moment”: namely, that the Furnace Creek of my childhood might provide the perfect equivalent for the graveyard where Pip has his traumatic encounter with Magwitch in a contemporary retelling of Dickens’ tale. With this realization, the rest of the novel simply took off, and while wildly swerving away from Dickens to become its own beast, never ceased to intrigue me to the end.