All the things in the book that seem really improbable are just things from my boarding school that I assumed would read as plausible because they had happened.

So, yeah, my boarding school did not (at the time) have AC. Window units were only available if you got a letter from a doctor saying you had asthma.

We were all obsessed with developing asthma, of course. Having asthma seemed like winning the lottery to me.

The physical setting of Culver Creek is very, very similar to the physical place where I went to boarding school, Indian Springs School. There’s a lake and an evil swan and there was an unairconditioned dorm circle when I was a student. (The dorms are now much nicer.) The barn where Alaska and Pudge and Takumi and everyone spend the night is no longer there. It’s an excellent school. Attending Indian Springs made my life possible, and I am very grateful to the school and its teachers.

Sort of. There was a similar thing at the boarding school I attended called a crispito. A chimichanga is basically a deep-fried burrito. I imagine bufriedos tasting a bit fried-er than chimichangas, but again, the way I imagine things is totally irrelevant because books belong to their readers.

Well, first let me say that books do not belong to their authors. Books belong to the reader. So you can pronounce bufriedo however you’d like; my pronunciation of it is not inherently better than yours. But now that we’ve got the philosophical question out of the way, I say buh-FREE- doh.