Rebecca Makkai

On #MeToo, the blinkered nature of whiteness, and how to shave 1,000 words out of your chapter.

Feb 2

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Intimate conversations with our greatest heart-centered minds.

I can’t remember how I first came to hear of Rebecca Makkai and her beautiful books but I do remember reading her first novel, The Borrower, when it came out. The enchantingly eccentric road trip of a librarian and her ten-year-old charge instantly stole my heart. And the exquisite writing bowled me over. Next came The Hundred-Year House a witty (Rebecca is nothing if not uproariously funny) and joyous delve into an artists’ colony that’s held in a haunted house. And, once more, the exquisite writing bowled me over. This was followed by Music for Wartime a collection of gorgeous, thoughtful short stories, many inspired by her family history. And, yes, the writing is exquisite. Then, of course, The Great Believers, which was a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award Finalist, and received the ALA Carnegie Medal. It explores the AIDS epidemic in the mid-and-late eighties in Chicago. Exquisite. Rebecca glories in a big cast of characters, complex plots often covering great swathes of time, humor, tenderness, frankness, and profound insight. While her characters are often in precarious situations, she treats them all with care.

All of this and more is present in her latest novel: I Have Some Questions For You. Set in New Hampshire in 2018, successful podcaster Bodie Kane has returned to her former boarding school, Granby, to teach a class on how to create your own podcast. One of her students decides to focus hers on the murder of Thalia Keith who attended the school back in 1995 when Bodie was also a student and who was briefly her roommate. A twenty-five-year-old Black man, Omar Evans, who had worked as the athletic trainer was convicted of the crime but it’s now clear to Bodie that the evidence was flimsy—and that she may know more about the murder than she realizes. As her student begins investigations for her podcast, Bodie launches her own including speaking with former classmates, connecting with a vibrant online community pushing for Omar’s release, and reckoning with her own memories. Beyonders: It’s so good! (Yes, the writing is exquisite!)

In addition to writing brilliant books, Rebecca is on Twitter generously offering up daily prompts to get writers writing. She’s also obsessed with Zillow, which she explains here (on her own fantastic Substack: SubMakk), and provides humorous takes on some alarming houses. And after her father, a translator, died in Budapest at the start of the pandemic, Rebecca launched Around the World in 84 Books where she promises to circumnavigate the globe by reading one important book from as many countries as she can.

Rebecca’s work has been translated into twenty languages. Her short stories were included in Best American Essays an impressive four years in a row. She’s on the MFA faculties of Sierra Nevada College and Northwestern University, and is Artistic Director of Story Studio Chicago. She’s also an all-round lovely, kind, and deeply funny human.

Throughout the book, you list various murders of young girls and women. It’s quite potent. Compiling these must have taken a fair amount of research. As did, I would imagine, researching how Thalia’s murder might have convincingly happened. What sort of toll did all this research and then the writing have on you?

Similarly, to my last book, The Great Believers, where I was doing so much really intense research on AIDS and loss, I always had somewhere to put the emotions that came up. I had this vessel, this book, waiting for all that sadness or anger. Often, when people go through something hard, art is a great way to therapize that, to get that out of them. There's an even more direct line when you're already creating a work of art: you do research that is then feed straight into that. We want that emotional energy that the research triggers but there's this pretty healthy mechanism to immediately turn around and use that information rather than sitting there and going “well, now I can't sleep.” I have something to pour it into.

That makes perfect sense. Your book is about women’s bodies: what is done to them: murder, rape, groping and other such violations; and also what women do to our own bodies: starving, self-harming, diminishing. Mixed in throughout is also kindness and pleasure. Amongst the predators are a few male students and a trusted teacher. Standing up to these men is both futile and dangerous because this behavior is accepted as normal and girls are taught to shrug it off. With the #MeToo movement, this began to change. Where do you think things stand now with women and our bodies?

The majority of the book is set in 2018, right after that first wave of #MeToo. We were talking a lot less at that point about cancel culture and doing a lot more excavating: Hey, this thing that happened to me when I was 15 or when I was 22 was not okay. Spring 2018 is when I started writing the book, so it was in the air and still is: that sense of looking back and that invitation to question.

The thing that surprised me about #MeToo was that it lasted. I really thought that it was going to be a day or two of people saying some stuff online, and then everyone was going to move on and forget about it. It was absolutely amazing to me that we were actually doing this, we’re actually holding people accountable, we're actually not going to put up with some of these things anymore.

And it wasn't just about the biggest terrible things that happened to people. It was people looking back and saying, you know what, I did not like being harassed in the hall at high school. I did not like being treated that way at my first job. For me, there were incidences, in high school in particular, where at the time I thought it was my problem for not finding something funny. Or it was my problem for overreacting. I thought I must have been singled out for this harassment because I couldn't roll with the punches or because I wasn't friends with the right people. Now looking back I realize not only was that not okay, but none of us were okay with it. It's not like I was the only one. It was just this culture of, “hey, don't speak out about this.”

I have two daughters. The oldest is a freshman in high school. They’re not putting up with most of the same stuff we did. If someone at my daughter's school said something homophobic, that person would be called out. And girls feel much more comfortable sticking up for themselves. Everyone is better trained, I hope, not to be an asshole. So there's a lot of good stuff happening. There’s a lot that's wrong with the world, but there's a lot that's improved.

I look back at not just the stuff I put up with but also the stuff I was a part of. Who knows what I said or did that I probably don't even remember, but being part of the mass of people who was okay with things or not being someone to step in and stop something. So it’s not just looking back and going, Oh, I'm vindicated. It's looking back and going, I can't believe I did those things, either.

A lot of this was on my mind as I wrote the book. Having said that, my job as a novelist is not to go in and say one thing, my job is to complicate everything. So we have Bodie’s husband who's being called out for things that aren’t really a problem.

That was my next question!

I think we've all had those experiences with #MeToo of yes, that's bad, that's bad. But then you look at someone being called out for having a bad relationship. We don't need to cancel someone for having a bad date that did not cross lines. Look at what happened to Aziz Ansari, which I think for so many of us was the moment things jumped the shark. There was a consensual thing that this woman later said, “Hey, by the way, I felt uncomfortable.” And he said, “I'm so sorry you felt that way.” Obviously, I wasn't there. It's not up to me. But I think a lot of us felt like, wait a second, this is a totally different issue. This is much more about personal perception; we can all perceive things differently than the other one does. So many of us, no matter our gender or sexuality, could imagine ourselves in a situation where we've made someone uncomfortable and didn't realize it. I think there's hopefully more and more room for nuance.

Twitter is not the best forum for nuance, and our initial discussions of all of this were on Twitter or other forms of social media. What the novel can do, and what movies can do, and what long form essays can do is dig into nuance. That's what they're for. Novels aren't going to reach as many people as Twitter but they can start conversations in book clubs or just in your own head.

In many ways, your novel is an indictment of our judicial system. There are passages I want to quote, but I don’t want to give away plot points! But I will say, the story begins where it seems a Black man has been wrongly convicted of murdering a young white woman on very flimsy evidence and has spent over two decades in prison. What drew you to writing about this?

I've always been fascinated by true crime. Like so many people, the world of podcasting made that more a part of my daily life as I’m folding my laundry. I was drawn to the most complicated stories, which, in many cases, included questionable or clearly wrongful convictions. That really is the gritty, sad underside of so much of the true crime we consume. We love stories where something happened, and then they caught the guy, and he's in prison, like an episode of Law and Order.

In reality, we have a huge number of wrongful convictions, and that disproportionately affects Black men. I was interested in a crime that had been solved but solved wrongly. The reality is there are good odds that first of all, someone slightly outside this community would be blamed for it, and if a Black man was there, and if he could be tied in any way to the crime, that that's who's going take the fall. The more I looked into it, the more I became completely infuriated by things like states, including New Hampshire, where they don't record interrogations. That’s unconscionable. The only reason not to record one is because there's stuff you don't want people to hear.

I started out not thinking totally positive things about our judicial system. And the deeper I dug, the worse that got. I had a wonderful resource, a public defender in New Hampshire, who helped me with a lot of my research into the New Hampshire criminal defense system specifically. The details in the book, such as Omar at a hearing for his retrial and not getting to eat food that day outside of breakfast, that is directly from her experience.

This is not 100% a book about wrongful incarceration, just to be clear. It doesn’t fully center that narrative or that person's narrative, in part because it wasn't the book I started to write and in part because I would not be the right person to tell that story with authenticity—but it’s something that’s key to the book. As is the question for Bodie of what systems she's part of, wittingly or unwittingly. She’s part of this school; she's part of the institution of whiteness; she's part of the American criminal justice system just as a citizen. You might not have been the person who intended to send the wrong person to prison but did you play some very small part in that? We're all complicit by being part of these systems. Doesn't mean it's our fault, but we are still in them.

After all that research, did you end up feeling at all hopeful about our judicial system, or even more discouraged than when you began?

I’m not sure. I will say that I've been following a lot of The Innocence Project work very closely. I think there's more attention being paid to wrongful convictions and significantly more awareness, at least in the general population, of the racial inequities that go into those things. I'd love to be a “the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice” kind of person but I honestly don't know.

I think it's a good thing that more and more of us are aware of the rate of wrongful conviction and the issues with interrogation and the ways that people can contribute to Innocence Project work. There's a downside to the sort of armchair detective internet sleuthing that goes on, including the invasion of people's privacy, which is something I'm getting at in this book. But at the same time, there's a lot of collecting of information. Let’s put this picture out there of Jane Doe: does anyone on the internet recognize her? Things that the internet and the modern era have made possible. Twenty or thirty years ago, we were just accepting things the way they were, you couldn't get these innocence movements going. Look at something like the West Memphis Three, these guys should never have been convicted. They were ultimately freed, if imperfectly, as a result of people coming together on the internet and advocating and comparing notes.

Your book, in part, is about racism, not just through the lens of the judicial system, but also this group of people reckoning with the implicit bias that they fell prey to. What was it like to be writing about that as a white person?

White people cannot wash our hands of writing about race. We cannot say, “Well, I'm white so writing about race is not for me.” It’s incredibly important that we are thinking about race, writing about race, including writing about whiteness and what that means: what it protects, what it excludes, what it implies. This is a book about race in terms of the wrongful conviction aspect. I also think it's a book about whiteness; about being part of a group of people who assume the criminal justice system is there to protect you and that the criminal justice system probably did its job, and then realizing that that's not the case.

First of all, they're not protecting you to begin with. And secondly, if they are, at whose expense? It’s something you undertake with great care. Similarly with The Great Believers, I was writing that as a straight woman. You can't shy away and say, “Oh, I can't possibly write about that.” And then stay in a safe zone where you don't take any risks. I had sensitivity readers, had people looking at things for accuracy, people who would have told me if I did something that was problematic, though certainly that's going to be different for everyone.

The one inherent structural flaw that I could not get away from is that because this is Bodie’s story, Omar’s story is fundamentally not centered. If I were going to level a criticism at my own book, one that I really couldn't write my way out of, it would be that the book itself is marginalizing this guy's experience because it's not about him.

You do address that with the white student who starts the podcast investigating the murder. She presents that argument.

Right. That's me and the book. While I'm not the person to write Omar’s story, I can tell the story of the blinkered nature of whiteness. And I think that's a very important story to tell.

You’re a master of plot, here and in all your books. How do you know what plot point to dole out when?

One of the greatest gifts I was given as a writer is that I taught elementary school for twelve years. At the end of every school day, I read to those kids aloud for half an hour from Charlotte's Web or whatever and got instant, visceral feedback when they are bored. You cannot tell yourself oh, they're really enjoying this when they’re rolling on the floor and someone found the scissors and oh boy! These are harsh critics. They’re not booing or anything, but they’re letting you know when they're not tuned in. From that I got this ingrained sense of pacing and momentum. And an ingrained fear of boring my audience. I know when I'm going to lose you; I know when it's been too long since something happened.

I do plan things out. I tend to outline in stages: I have rough notes. Then I start writing and throwing spaghetti at the wall. Maybe I get a third of the way in, then realize I don't know what I'm doing here, must be time to stop and retroactively outline what I have, think ahead a little bit more, hit another wall, outline some more. With my novel writing students, I'm always trying to make sure they understand that when they hit a wall, it's not a sign that the book is broken, or that they're a bad writer, or that this is the wrong book. When you hit a wall, it's a sign that you need to switch to some left brain thinking and do some architectural structural work. Then you get back into creative mode later. When you hit a wall, I think it's a gift. You took it as far as you could, now it's time for notecards and highlighters and to raid the school supply aisle at your pharmacy.

In keeping with this, you're also a master of the setup. Not just the setup of the plot, but also the setup of the characters. For instance, we learn early on that Bodie “cared about details,” so that her keen interest in the case rings true. Do you have all that laid in before you start the story? Or do you finish a draft and then circle back and set things up as needed?

I say this a lot and then I think I sound kind of psychopathic, but I reverse engineer my perfect victim in terms of the protagonist. If this is the situation that I want, firstly, what kind of person would get themselves into that situation? Then secondly, what kind of person would be the most changed by that situation, the most vulnerable to it?

I did a lot of thinking before I started this novel; I had a hard time figuring out who Bodie was going to be: what her job was, how she would get involved in this again. Names matter a lot to me, I can't latch on to a character until I have exactly the name for them, I couldn't find her name for so long, and then I made up this random name and I knew that’s who she is. You can look at any successful book or play and go okay, why is this the protagonist? Why is Hamlet the protagonist of Hamlet? Well, if you do the same plot, but give it to a guy who's really sure of himself, it just doesn't work. You need Hamlet to happen to Hamlet. You need it to be this person who's fundamentally incapable of direct action, and everything he does has to be at this slant: he has to put on a play or he stabs someone but through a curtain.

This is so interesting. It’s not that the characters come to you and then you go on a journey with them. You have the journey and then you figure out who's the person that can go on it.

Yes. I know that's opposite to how a lot of writers work. A lot of writers talk about starting with a character who just kind of appeared to them one day. Then their job is to push that person into a plot. They have this character who just wants to wander around and say things instead of doing anything interesting. I have the opposite issue. I always start with scenario and then go, “Okay, so who is this person going to be?” It's not like that's an easy solution, it just always been the way that I work.

You’re also a master editor! You know how to strip language down to its bones yet keep it so vibrant and exciting. And, I believe, you enjoy doing this.

To be clear, there are two major phases of editing: macro editing and micro editing. The macro editing is painful. That's the: I need to take this whole thing apart and combine these five scenes and do away with this whole plotline. That is not my favorite. The analogy that I use is that it's like if you've ever had a kid bring you their Lego project, and they were trying to follow the directions and they're like, this doesn't fit. You look at it, and say, “it's because you made a mistake fifteen steps ago.” And they're like, “don't break it!” And you say, “I have to.” That’s the painful macro phase that's most of editing, honestly. There’s still great joy there because you're fixing things and you're like, “Oh my god, this and this can go together.” Or: “Wait a second. I never needed this.” When you find those solutions, it's like ding ding ding, you know that you're doing it right.

But when I get to that micro editing phase where it probably took me three sentences to get to what I needed to say and I can go in and make this one sentence, or I focus on the language and the music of the line, that is nothing but fun! I love the: this chapter is too long, can I shave 1,000 words? When I do workshops with my grad students, we take ten minutes after the workshop itself to pick a paragraph and line edit the hell out of it as a group with the author's involvement, and then read the before and after. Usually what we're ending up with is something that is shorter but contains significantly more. Not just reads better but has more nuance and more suggestion and more subtext.

Do you have tips on how to shave those words?

The first thing is anything that can go should go, whether it's a word or a sentence or a paragraph or an entire character. If it's not load bearing, let's get rid of it. It’s also places where we can be more specific. So the line where someone said, “he looked around at all the junk,” Well, let's pick some junk. Perhaps a deflated basketball. So we're cutting dead weight, and then we're getting specifics in there. And we're cutting dialogue that’s basically just small talk but taking the dialogue that matters and helping it drip with subtext.

A male student grabs the left breast 0f a female student while she’s sitting on the school stairs. Later in life, she’s diagnosed with inoperable cancer in her left breast that’s metastasized throughout her body. Bodie believes the cancer is from Peewee’s abusive grab. In part, you’re being figurative here, but do you also believe that illness can begin with trauma, especially if it’s unresolved?

I'm being figurative, and Bodie's being figurative, too. But people could read that any number of ways. The book is interested in the ways that physical and emotional trauma stay a part of who we are. Later on Bodie is talking about one of the boys and says something like he's still the same person but he has rings around him like a tree from all the things that have happened to him. I'm interested in the passage of time; it's always a core theme of whatever I'm writing. In this case, that question of to what extent we still are the person we were in childhood or adolescence; that person is still with us, even though we are in no way still an adolescent.

That's beautiful. The novel ends, in part, with this focus on hope. One of my favorite lines is when Bodie is staring off into the ravine contemplating the plants, and she says, “Everything green is something that survived.”

The book ends on a weird combination of devastation and hope, but it's a very bittersweet hope which I think is realistic. When you look at why do we survive? Why do we keep going? Why do we get up when it's hard? It's all hope. It's all this promise of things getting better or being able to make things better for other people that keeps us going. The end of any book is focused on the present, the past, or the future, or any combination of those. You can have a book that ends in the present moment on some image. You can have a book that looks back on its own past: the cheesy version is: “so I thought about everything we’d been through.” You can have ones that are focused on the future like Huck Finn going, “I'm going light out for the territory.” There’s this forward tilt to it. Then there are combinations like the ending of The Great Gatsby where we're going forward, but we're also going backward.

This novel is both. Bodie’s been living in the past, back on the campus, thinking about all that’s happened, but it’s primarily forward looking. She’s not sitting there thinking about the future, but we have this sense of ongoing fight.

You’re a self-proclaimed extrovert. What is it that you love about people?

The definition of extroversion is you get energy from being around other people. If I'm alone at home, I get droopy or tired or it's harder to get things done. When I'm around other people, I feel energized. Certainly as a writer, I need to be alone plenty. But if my day has socialization in it, it's going to be a much better day. I'm going to be able to sit down and focus later.

Do you tend to write alone or do you like writing in public places?

I'm really happy writing in a coffee shop. Kafka said something like, the cafe is the perfect place for the writer because you're simultaneously alone and in the middle of everything. He wasn't just talking about concentration, he was talking about the parallel to the writer’s lot in life: being outside of society but then writing about humanity. I eat up new experiences. I eat up the stories other people tell about their lives. I’m not sitting there going, “Oh, I'm going use that in a story” but some tiny corner of that becomes part of something that happens in a book, not in a way that person would even recognize. But if my job is to write about humans in the world, why would I not be constantly filling that gas tank with human experience and interaction?

That's beautifully put. So much is hard these days. Where are you finding joy?

I'm a pretty happy person to begin with. Even in years that are tougher, I'm still a very optimistic, fundamentally happy person. I genuinely love writing and genuinely love teaching, and those are the two things that I do a lot of. My kids are tremendously fun people. I enjoy the fact that I can still experience absolutely new things in life. A couple weeks ago, at 44, I went skiing for the first time ever. I loved it! I fell a few times, but the snow was really soft.

Mostly because of my career, I'm getting to do so much travel to places that I never would have gone otherwise. In some cases, it's someplace very exciting and beautiful because it's some wonderful festival. In other cases, it's some college town somewhere: Manhattan, Kansas or Dayton, Ohio. I would not normally have found myself there. But every place I go, I do the Wikipedia deep dive on its history and it's always fascinating. And I get grad students to tell me absolutely everything about the place where we are. I think life is longer when you have very distinct memories. A bunch of days spent exactly the same way, doing the same thing are going to blur. But I spend two days in Manhattan, Kansas, and I remember them later. Maybe not the most romantic time of my life, but I remember the interesting things there.

I'm very privileged in that way, of course, that my life is allowing me to do that. But it's not all about that. On day five of the pandemic, I started learning Spanish with my kids and now I'm someone who can kind of speak Spanish. That's very exciting. And I’m doing this reading in translation project where I'm looking at eighty-four books, and I'm discovering these foundational, brilliant texts that I hadn't even heard of before. I refuse to have a boring day.

Sounds like you have abundant curiosity—and find joy in all the discoveries your abundant curiosity brings you.

Yes. A day when you learn something interesting, that is a cool day.

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