Book Club

6 takeaways from Book Club’s author discussion with Rebecca Makkai

"I wanted to be able to contradict myself and I wanted to be able to get into this gray area."

April 26, 2023

Rebecca Makkai’s latest novel, “I Have Some Questions For You,” tackles important issues like wrongful incarceration, sexual assault, and collective trauma, but the author didn’t set out to address those themes. Instead, she started with a simple premise: “Dead girl in a swimming pool.”

The new book centers on Bodie, an alumna of a New Hampshire boarding school, who is forced to relive the murder of her senior year roommate when she returns to her old campus for a teaching job and meets a student working on a true crime podcast about the case. In the process, Bodie discovers that the man who was put away for the murder may not have been at fault.

“I’m never setting out, going ‘I’m going to write about the following social issues.’ I set out writing a story. Realism takes me [in] a lot of these directions. Me getting in there and wanting to complicate everything takes me in these directions. And then those themes just announced themselves,” the author told Boston.com.

The Carnegie Medal winner and Pulitzer finalist joined our Book Club for a discussion of her latest novel with Becky Dayton, owner of The Vermont Book Shop. The two talked about how true crime muddles how we think about murder investigations, the surprise reckoning of the #MeToo movement, and the elements of a satisfying book ending.

Read on for takeaways from their discussion or view the recording below, and sign up for more Book Club updates.

Makkai drew from both personal experience and research to create a realistic boarding school setting.

As a child, Makkai was a day student at a boarding school outside of Chicago. Years later, her husband accepted a job teaching at the same school and the couple has lived on the school’s campus with their children for the past 21 years. Because of her background, Makkai was already familiar with boarding school culture when she began working on her novel.

Makkai emphasized that the school at the center of her novel, the fictional Granby School, isn’t based on her alma mater and is instead meant to reflect the distinct elements of a traditional New England boarding school. Getting that right required additional research.

“I had a lot of fun completely inventing the school,” she said, adding that everything from the school’s mascot to its founding history was created from scratch.

The true crime genre influenced how Makkai approached this novel.

“I Have Some Questions For You” centers on the years-old murder investigation of a young woman at a boarding school in New Hampshire. Makkai wanted to make the mystery at the center of her novel a case of public interest, not unlike the stories of murdered white women that capture huge true crime audiences in the real world. The goal was to look at the good and bad that come out of the public attention.

“I’m fundamentally writing fictional crime, not true crime, but true crime is a subject of the book,” she said. “It’s a bit of taking…the exact type of crime that would be instant bait for the true-crime podcast, like boarding school, rich, pretty…and I’m taking it out of that kind of gossipy true crime genre. Let’s actually look at wrongful incarceration, which is part of so many of these stories. Let’s actually look at the way police investigations work — all these things.”

The novel tackles complicated social issues regarding sexual misconduct.

The protagonist, Bodie, is forced at many points throughout the book to reflect on and reexamine instances of sexual harassment she encountered as a teen. At the same time, her ex-husband is accused of and “canceled” for misconduct she doesn’t view as egregious. The story gave Makkai the opportunity to do her own reflection on the lessons of the #MeToo movement and explore its nuances.

“I wanted to be able to contradict myself and I wanted to be able to get into this gray area. I was not interested in a book where, just again and again, we go back and we hold someone responsible and that’s the right thing and this is the message because, in real life, there are these very complicated situations.

The writing process is about more than hitting word count goals.

Once she sits down to write, Makkai said it’s easy for her to hit upwards of 5,000 words. But that’s only possible because she allows herself plenty of time to ideate, research, and outline her story. She encourages her writing students and other adult writers she works with to not hold themselves to strict word count goals.

“I have a lot of advanced, adult novel writing students and they’ll say…’Oh, my God, I got nothing done. I got no writing done. I did this research. I went to this remote island for research and read these five books and then I did an outline and then I interviewed this person. Then I did like all this like character work. Anyway, I got no writing done,’” Makkai said. “What are you talking about? That’s all writing.”

Makkai doesn’t like neat endings.

In addition to her novels, Makkai has a regular Substack where she writes about books she’s reading and the craft of writing. She’s currently publishing a series on the different ways to end a novel based on level of resolution, timing, scope, and more.

“I’m always really interested in endings in relation to time, whether we are ending just in the last moments. Are we looking forward? Are we looking back or are we looking at the moment? This one does a bit of all three, but mostly, it’s looking back,” Makkai said. “I don’t love the sort of, everything tied up so neatly ending, because then I don’t believe it.”

Makkai’s current reading goal is taking her “around the world in translation.”

In 2020, Makkai’s father passed away in Hungary at age 84 and she wasn’t able to attend the memorial. In honor of the life he lived as a literary translator, Makkai is making her way around the globe by reading 84 books in translation. She started with the Hungarian novel, “The Door” by Magda Szabó, and just completed her eighth book, the Syrian novel, “No Knives in the Kitchens of This City” by Khaled Khalifa. You can read along with her and offer recommendations for her next read on her Substack.

“I’d been reading so much contemporary American fiction, which is great, but that’s a diet of one kind of thing. To be able to read something from 1904 or a play, let alone things from other places, is [a] huge, wonderful revelation for me,” Makkai said.