I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai

Perhaps my favorite kind of novel lives on the razor’s edge between literary fiction (whatever that means) and genre fiction. A romantic comedy that makes me think about romantic comedies, a thriller that discusses the fraught political situation of our nation, historical fiction that resides in the present as much as the past. These are my favorite kinds of novels, and Rebecca Makkai’s brilliant novel, I Have Some Questions for You, is precisely that kind of novel.

I’m not alone in having gone through a prolonged true crime phase. I won’t say I’m entirely out of it, either. From time to time, my partner and I will take a break from our regularly scheduled programming and fall head-first into the darkness of a (well-made) true crime documentary. There’s something about it. It hits differently.

I used to work a job that was primarily data entry, and I’d sit at a computer for hours a day listening to things: podcasts, books, anything. Music won’t cut it when you need to fill eight hours a day. During this period, I discovered true crime podcasts: serial killers, missing persons, unsolved crimes. I devoured them all. I filled days spent at that job, commuting, and cooking, listening to the horrifying details of murder. When I couldn’t sleep at night, I would find myself scrolling through Wikipedia pages and Reddit threads on these same topics.

Is there something wrong with me? Probably. Hard to think that one could digest that much violence and not even blink. That you could hear the grizzly details of Jeffrey Dahmer and not turn away in horror but, perversely, want more.

I know I’m not alone in this fascination. At any given moment, about half of the most listened-to podcasts in the country are true crime. Netflix seems to have shifted its entire model toward serving this insatiable national appetite for violence. Why pay writers when you can just run miniseries about murder?

I can claim that my fascination stems from distrusting our criminal justice system, and I have since spent hours listening to brilliant books that detail that system and its failings. But we all know that it's not just that. We don’t listen and watch these things solely because we want to see justice done.

In her brilliant book Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism (If you want more on this book, check out my previous post on it and Emma Cline’s novel The Girls), Amanda Montell discusses how psychologists liken our obsession with these types of media to rubbernecking. You slow down to see the accident partly because you understand it could’ve been you. There’s a peculiarity about true crime content in that it predominantly features violence done to women, and its primary demographic is also women. That’s what comes from living in a society where there’s always a latent sense of fear and danger. A man on a bus, a stranger walking down a beach, a lingering stare. They could all be innocuous, but sometimes they aren’t, and these documentaries and podcasts show when they aren’t.

This is one of the primary themes of Rebecca Makkai’s stunning novel. The book is about a woman (a successful podcaster in the mold of Karina Longworth (LISTEN TO YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS, ITS SO GOOD!)) who returns to her high school boarding school to teach a short course on podcasting. When she was a student there, one of her classmates was killed, and returning to the school dregs up that seemingly solved case.

You can imagine where it goes from here—at least the basic strokes of it. You’d never be able to guess the twists and turns it takes, the way she frames it as a letter to an initially unknown suspect in the case, the gripping way you can’t possibly put the book down for even a second. I can’t speak highly enough about how this novel captivates the reader, but when you finish, It won’t leave, and the ideas that get stuck in the back of your brain aren’t about the plot. They’re about the subtext.

Makkai explores the nature of true crime. Her podcast (again, really listen to You Must Remember This) explores early Hollywood starlets. Anyone who knows anything about this era and those women knows how the studios treated them as disposable, how they were seen as young, pretty faces, only to be prized until the next one came along. Makkai brilliantly connects this period of Hollywood, and those women, to our current true crime obsession. When a young woman is murdered, she is forever the age she was when she died. She is preserved as she was then, just as those starlets are preserved in film.

Our narrator, Bodie Kane, constantly reflects on her position in this crime and whether she’s the right person to tell this story. She wonders if she’s trying to insert herself into the story for selfish reasons or if she’s genuinely trying to write a wrong. It’s a fascinating dissection of our modern world and how the #MeToo era interacts and coincides with our national true crime addiction.

There are so many excellent literary devices in this novel – the way its framed as a letter of sorts to a suspect whom the narrator knew while at school, the way it references prominent cases of sexual assault that were in the media at the time the novel is set, and the way it breaks for Covid emphasizing the way the world itself (and the movement) was put on hold during the pandemic. It’s a really mature and carefully constructed novel by a superb writer. 

She uses these devices to anchor the novel to a time and place while also giving it a timeless essence. The tragedy of the era she sets her book in is that it's constantly repeating itself. How many of the headlines she references, always vague but specific, will appear again? How many more women will face predatory violence from people in power?

I can’t recommend this book enough. Its characters are rich and alive, its setting textured, the writing often funny and always enthralling. It’s everything I want in a novel, and it’s a must-read both for its macro ideas and its ability to keep you glued to the page.