Natasha Diaz, the author of What Lies Beneath the Flowers, is here to share the inspiration behind her reimagining of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. Natasha explores how she transformed the classic novel’s themes and characters into a contemporary mystery about identity, belonging, and the places that shape us.
The original Great Expectations has a lot going on. Pip, the poor orphan protagonist with a heart of gold, is desperate to be worthy of rich Estella’s love and attention. Alongside this desperate love story is the looming threat of “the Convict” who lurks behind Pip from the first chapter all the way through to the bright glamour of the upper-class world Pip enters after being urged by Estella’s strange, agoraphobic mother. The novel’s quirky characters complement its windy narrative, but at its core, Great Expectations is a story about class differences and the way we have been trained to conflate our self-worth with our financial standing. As someone whose family experienced poverty and climbed out of it, the subject matter resonated, but there were aspects of the story that, for me, didn’t quite hit.
When I was six, after my parents separated, my mother and I found ourselves living in an illegal basement apartment that eventually became infested with rats. The housing was less than optimal, but it was housing, and what we could afford. After two years, we got out and moved uptown to Harlem where we lived through my young adulthood. Growing up, I remember engaging with people of higher economic status whose eyes bulged out of their faces when we told them where we lived. A few times, friends’ parents expressed concern about whether it was safe to allow their children to sleep over.
I never understood the misperception of this neighborhood that had held me down. A place that pulled us from poverty and gave us a chance to find the footing we needed to climb out. Years later, I watched the same people who had refused to come over move in. Gentrifiers swallowed my neighborhood up piece by piece and in 2009, we got spit out. I often think about that time in my life when my family was emerging from immense struggles and were offered peace and safety in the form of community. I think about the beauty that can happen when people live alongside each other, and its opposition to the idea that you have made it when you can afford to be secluded and gated apart. This is what I missed in the original book, a more nuanced portrayal of lower income communities. The struggles and the tight-knit fabric that’s sewn through survival.
I plucked the female characters from the original Great Expectations to lead the cast in What Lies Beneath the Flowers. I swapped Pip for Pippa, an artistic soul who’s drawn toward flowers and chaos, and Bidi (‘Biddy’ in the OG, and a character I felt was short changed) a type-A anticapitalist go-getter, intent on saving her community from the grips of gentrification. When Estella, a local socialite goes missing, Bidi and Pippa both decide to try to find her, but their motivations are opposed. Pippa, like Dickenson’s Pip, is drawn to the allure of the upper class, whereas Bidi wants to use the reward money from finding Estella to invest in their neighborhood. Together, they figure out how complicated it can be to step out of their comfort zones and into other worlds. On the journey to figure out what happened to Estella, they have to come to terms with who they are and who they truly want to be.
As an author, I think the beauty in a retelling is the opportunity to pull from the core of the original and mold it into something new. The existence of aspects of Great Expectations that I can’t relate to doesn’t mean they were inauthentic to the communities Dickenson wrote about. It was a different time, a different country, a different author. My goal was not to write a better version of Great Expectations; my goal was to make it mine.
