It was a difficult summer. My wife and I had to put a pet down, juggle demanding work and parenting, and face a difficult health diagnosis in the extended family. My dad’s dementia has continued its course. In the middle of it all, while carrying what often felt like a crushing weight, I was trying to finish a book.

In early August, I had an unexpected lunch with a friend at Hope College that I hadn’t seen in three years. He told me about the school’s degree program for men serving long sentences at the Muskegon Correctional Facility, about an hour’s drive north. I learned that one of the teachers had introduced my book Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life, in a first-year seminar, in an effort to help the men think seriously about what it is they wanted—and to help them understand the way that conflict happens in the prison environment.

I was told that one student in that class became so captivated by mimetic theory that he tracked down and read everything he could fi…