In 2019 I told you that Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers was the one book you should read that year (still true), and while I’m not yet prepared to say I Have Some Questions for You is the best thing you’ll read this year, it’s certainly in the running.
Following Brodie Kane, a podcast producer, as she returns to her high school boarding school to both teach a class and investigate the murder of her former school roommate, the book has the distinct feel of a true crime podcast (I’m sure someone has done a comparison to Serial. And… they have), but one that artfully and consciously plays with the ‘just asking questions’ element of exploring a closed murder case, the retrieval of lost memories, the unearthing of new evidence, the exploration of how changes mores of sex and race influence how crimes are investigated and prosecuted, the risks to the families of victims, the exploitation of trauma, and on.
And while all of that makes for great reading – and the murder mystery element itself is captivating – it’s the sections peppered throughout about the all too frequent ways violence against women is normalized, make routine, made mundane and forgettable that utterly gut punches.
The careful way Makkai has Brodie explore the pendulum of #metoo stories through an accusation made against Brodie’s ex-husband is nuanced and challenging not simply in how Brodie reacts, but in how Brodie reacts to the reactions, how so much of what gets told – and believed – is in the interpretation.
And that, I guess, is the heart of the book. How an innocent person can spend years in prison for a crime they obviously didn’t commit because of a story that gets told and believed. How narratives we tell ourselves about our teenage lives get made real and real and real, until we meet that story retold through another perspective as an adult and are forced to consider whether we might have believed a fiction. How everyone we know and everything with think is necessarily a story and that the real failure – of individuals and institutions – is in not recognizing the way this story is made, made up, and reified.
It’s really good.
Literary Vice 