Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. The latest novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist, Rebecca Makkai, is an exploration of our true crime obsession, the failures of our justice system, and an examination of the MeToo Reckoning. The book is titled, I Have Some Questions For You. Our protagonist is Bodie, a successful host of a Hollywood history podcast.

When her old high school alma mater, the Granby Boarding School in New Hampshire, invites her to teach a two-week class, Bodie accepts thinking it'll be a chance to reunite with old friends and teachers, but when she arrives on campus, Bodie becomes flooded with memories of her old junior-year roommate, Thalia. Thalia was murdered and found in the campus swimming pool the spring of their senior year. At the time, Bodie didn't think she had much valuable information to give the police. After all, she and Thalia weren't very close. Eventually, the young Black athletic trainer was forced into a confession and was convicted. Bodie assumed that the case was closed, but now she starts to wonder whether the right person is behind bars. That's because Bodie thinks she knows something no one else does, that Thalia was having an inappropriate relationship with the school's choir teacher. When two students in Bodie's podcast class become interested in investigating Thalia's case for their project, Bodie hops on board, and the more she digs, the more she becomes convinced investigators have gotten this case all wrong.

I Have Some Questions For You, was our March Get Lit With All Of It book club selection. Rebecca Makkai joined us earlier this week in front of a sold-out crowd at the SNFL Rooftop Event Center at the New York Public Library. Here's my conversation with Rebecca Makkai.

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I want to know about the origin story of the book. Did you think, "Ooh, I want to write a murder mystery," or, "Ooh, I want to write a coming-of-age tale at a boarding school. Oh, I'm really interested in podcasting."?

Rebecca Makkai: None of those, [chuckles] although-- Yes, all of those. There are a lot of tributaries for any individual book. If I say I want to write anything, every single time, I'm like, "I want to write a really simple book this time. It's going to be short." Then I don't manage to do that. In this case, it was a matter of a lot of things coming together, thinking about boarding school as an environment. It's a world I know really well. Maybe we'll talk about that later. Thinking about the way that I was looking back on the '90s, on my adolescence, the way a lot of us were doing that in general, but also in the MeToo, that early MeToo time, thinking about our fascination with true crime, and how that can be useful. It can also be really problematic.

The original idea was simply like I-- It's very interesting to me how people might have to reconvene to testify in some legal proceeding about something that happened years and years ago, and how do you trust your memory, how do you do that. Very often, those people maybe still live in the same city where the thing happened, but what if we were talking about something like a boarding school and nobody lived in the woods in New Hampshire, they'd never lived there, and if they had to come back together, they'll have to stay in one hotel, and probably deal with each other. That was the book I tried to write, was all these people stuck in a hotel. In reality, that doesn't come until the end of the book now, the way that it turned out.

Alison Stewart: Before this book, were you a consumer of True-Crime Podcasts?

Rebecca Makkai: Yes, absolutely. That's something that-- Our interest in true crime is nothing new. Always reminding people they literally sold souvenirs outside the Lindbergh Baby murder trial. This is so alarming. We have media now, podcasts, but also Reddit boards, and also YouTube, where you could spend all day, all weekend looking into someone's case that fascinates you. You could almost start to feel ownership over it. That happens in an interesting way. I'm one of those people who's really drawn to this stuff and really conflicted about it. I can see that sometimes it does real good. We get old cases reexamined, there are wrongful convictions that need overturning, and in some cases, it's just all lured fascination.

The book doesn't make a thesis statement on that at all, but the book--

Alison Stewart: It invites that conversation.

Rebecca Makkai: Right.

Alison Stewart: The ethics around true crime. Whether it's serial didn't necessarily get an insight out of prison, but no one would've thought about that case had it not been for the podcast. As you mentioned, people have these weird parasocial relationships and think that they are involved. Did your thoughts about the ethics around true crime change over the course of writing it, or evolve in any way?

Rebecca Makkai: I think they did, not necessarily because of what I was writing, but because I kept really paying attention to true crime media. I started the book in 2019, so it's been few generations of podcasts and things like that. I think it got stronger in both directions. Both my excitement actually that were able, through podcasting or through other media, to look at cases with marginalized victims, or very, very cold cases, or look at wrongful incarceration, look at old cases with modern forensics. I'm also seeing just this absolute perian interest stuff. There's a lot of giggling about it that seems to really just re-traumatize families.

By paying attention, I think I just saw more extremes in various directions. My job, of course, isn't to have really an opinion. My job is to get in there and muck around. I think my understanding deepened, but I don't know that I changed my mind about it being fundamentally good or bad, because I never thought either one.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about the location where a lot of the action takes place. For people who don't know, you went to boarding school, you lived at the boarding school you attended, is that right?

Rebecca Makkai: I still--

Alison Stewart: Tell us. That is great. What's the story?

Rebecca Makkai: It's complicated. I was a day student. I was a scholarship day student at a boarding school. I had a really good experience. I left, I went to college, I went to grad school. I met my husband, I dragged him back to the Midwest. He was a teacher. He got a job at-- The place he got the job was the high school I had attended. When people teach there, they get campus housing. I still live there. I have lived for 21 years on the campus of my high school, [laughter] which is-- I don't teach there. That is the situation. [laughs] Is it weird?

Alison Stewart: So many questions. I have so many questions for you.

Rebecca Makkai: It was weird for the first month, I'll say that. Then after that, it just becomes normal. I spent way more time there as an adult than I ever spent there as a kid.

Alison Stewart: Do you see any friendly ghosts, even,Casper like ghosts of the past when you're walking somewhere? Do you have those moments?

Rebecca Makkai: It's interesting because there are-- As someone who doesn't teach there, but just lives there, there are parts of the campus that I see all the time. I'm walking my dog, my kids learn to walk on the tennis court, or things that have been added, rebuilt. Then there are parts of the campus that I don't see that often. Just a certain classroom, the girls' bathroom in this one building. Those ones, if I go in there, it's a little bit more, "Oh." This is the same feeling I get when I go back to my college and I haven't been in 10 years. You go, "Wait, did you move that statue? I swear that was over there." Things come rushing back to you.

It's interesting because the experience I'm writing about in the book is of someone who returns after a long absence, which is very much not my experience of my high school. It's the opposite.

Alison Stewart: This school, Granby in New Hampshire, New Hampshire, of course, immediately start thinking Exeter, St. Paul. It could be New Hampshire, Massachusetts, or Connecticut. Those are the three big boarding school hubs. First of all, how did you go with the name Granby?

Rebecca Makkai: It's because there is a Granby, Vermont, there's a Granby, Massachusetts, there's a Granby, Connecticut, but there's no Granby, New Hampshire. I was like, "This sounds really New England, so we're going to go with it."

Alison Stewart: What is it about a boarding school as a setting that is ripe for a novel?

Rebecca Makkai: Several things. Then I want to tell you why New Hampshire too, because that's part of this. The boarding school, first of all, I think it's either a setting that people are interested in because they went to one or they're interested in it because they didn't go to one. [chuckles] This is the same with a college certainly, but the idea of this very permanent, often very historic place, and then this really transient population coming through.

What's different from a college is high school has a much more formative, vulnerable time. There's just something about these generations, very quick generations, these are four-year generations of kids coming through. If you look back in real human life for however many generations, you get to the 1800s. You look back at that many generations at a boarding school, it's like 1997. There's something about the passage of time. There's also, of course, the hothouse Petri dish aspect of that isolation. Then the New Hampshire thing, so you're right, it would be New Hampshire, Connecticut, Massachusetts, those would be the classic places. New Hampshire is a state where it is a small state with a small state budget. The endowment of any one boarding school in that state is practically as much as the GDP of that state. A police investigation has really different pressures on it. The school is going to be weighing on that state in ways that in Massachusetts would not happen, or in New York would not happen. I was looking at, of course, some real-life cases of various kinds where interesting things happen when the school is as wealthy as the state.

Alison Stewart: When we meet Bodie as an adult, she's a successful podcaster, two kids, marriage is hmm. We meet her also as this vulnerable kid in the '90s. When you think about, what has stayed the same about Bodie in her life, and then what really changed?

Rebecca Makkai: This is interesting because you're crafting a character over several decades. You have to really think about that. She's always been a collector of facts about people. She's always been very, very observant, and really thinking critically as an outsider very often about the ways hierarchies work, systems of power. As a student, she was this fish-out-of-water kid from Indiana, really watching people carefully just in order to get by. As an adult, she's a film historian, and she specifically, her work is in women in Hollywood in the early 20th century in the abuses of power by the Hollywood studio system.

I think it's very similar looking at people she doesn't really know, she didn't really know Rita Hayworth, and trying to set the record straight, trying to figure out what's known, what's unknown, what does she know, what can she figure out. I think that's a big one. I wanted someone, though, also who had changed dramatically in that time. Someone who was very, very insecure and ungrounded as an adolescent, and is very secure and successful as an adult, so that when she steps back on campus, she's really pulled between those two polarities so she doesn't quite know who she is anymore. It was important that I have someone who could be unseated pretty easily.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting you talked about how Bodie doesn't know Rita Hayworth, doesn't know these people that she's spending so much time going down this deep dive. She didn't really know her roommate exactly.

Rebecca Makkai: Either.

Alison Stewart: Why is that important when we think about Bodie's somewhat obsession with it? She's obsessed with finding about something about someone she didn't know that well.

Rebecca Makkai: Yes. Well, I think one of the interesting things there, so these two young women had been roommates, assigned roommates their junior year. At the end of their senior year, Thalia, this young woman, is found dead in the campus swimming pool with significant injuries to her body. It was something where at the time, many people knew more than they were probably saying. Many of them weren't saying things simply because they thought that that information was unimportant. Bodie was one of them. She wasn't even sure what she knew. She definitely felt like it wasn't her place. She didn't avail herself of the school counselor who was brought in because she felt like she didn't have a right to go.

There's this resistance on her part to turning those same investigative skills, those same critical skills onto this case because you know how high school just sticks with you. Those high school hierarchies have stuck with her. There's this fear of, "Well, if I really get involved in this, people are going to think-- they're going to look at me funny because I wasn't in that crowd."

At the same time, this is something that has deeply troubled her. It's someone that she-- She was not obsessed with this girl in high school, but was someone who seemed above her in some way. This awakening as an adult to realize I'm older than she ever got to be. I have a lot more agency than she ever got to have. I can do something about that, but very wary of her own obsession at the same time. It's not as simple, yay, let's go citizen detective. It's more complicated than that.

Alison Stewart: We asked our readers on Instagram whether they thought Bodie did the right thing by investigating this case, and 92% said yes.

Rebecca Makkai: Good. I don't need them all to. It's not like-- Because it is very complex, and I would say that by the end of the book, some good has been done. There's maybe an undoing of closure that feels negative to some people in the book by the end of the book. That would certainly, if she's correct in what she feels happened, being very cryptic here, that would definitely be a step towards justice. Whether she was the right person to do it, is another question as well.

Alison Stewart: What were you able to do, or how did it help your story for this part of the book, at least this part of the book to be set in the '90s?

Rebecca Makkai: The one thing that I really gave Bodie in common with me was a high school graduation year. Very few other things that I could point to. I graduated high school in 1995, which is the year this all went down. That allowed me to anchor this in time. It was partly things like, oh, the death of Kurt Cobain and how everyone reacted to that thing, things like that. We were all watching my so-called life. This was the time that I was looking back to in those early days of MeToo, when we were looking back not only on the marquee traumas, but these subtler ones also, the microaggressions death by a thousand cuts, hallway harassment. I was looking back on that time, and this sudden awareness that I had of I thought I didn't have a right to be upset by those things. Every woman knows that the hahaha laugh when you're really uncomfortable. You learn how to do that, and you assume everyone else must be okay with it too, because they're all doing that and you never talk about it. We didn't at the time. You look back now and you go, "Wait a second. I was upset. I had every right to be upset, and other people were upset too." That's not something unique to the '90s, for sure, but it is something that has changed since the '90s. I felt like I could really tap into that moment in gender politics, in adolescence, in culture, in a way that I needed to process.

Alison Stewart: What did you want to investigate about the stories that we make up about our past, and that we swear this happened? Because I thought that was really interesting also that Bodie had very definite opinions about people, and then found out that her opinions were just that opinions. They weren't reality about the super popular guy who she thought was super wealthy that came from a working-class family.

Rebecca Makkai: That happens, right? It's part of the shock I think of reconnecting with people from high school, from college, is how much they've changed. Part of it is realizing that you had them wrong to begin with. This actually happened two days ago. A high school friend who we'd been not close friends or this wouldn't have happened, but we were in adjacent to the same friend group, came to an event that I did, and we were getting coffee afterwards, and I said, "How's your brother?" She goes, "What brother?" I realized the guy, who also went to our high school, who was two years younger than her, who had the same unusual last name, was not related to her in any way. I had gone through all of high school assuming, and they looked alike, and I assuming that they were brother and sister, one of them might have even joked about it at some point. Something. I was like, "You are kidding me, that that guy was not your brother." Oh my God.

She was a lot smarter than him in retrospect. [laughter] That might have been a tip off. There's things that-- but then there's this other category. There are the things that, this is a weird one, the things you had right the first time, and that you overthought later. I thought something was sketchy about that teacher. Oh no, he was just being really supportive of his students, and you have this adult gloss on it, discounting how perceptive teenagers can be. Then lo and behold, it turns out that that was really happening. That's happened to a lot of us in a lot of situations. That's another-- Yes. I can't say the word I want to say on the radio, but it's a mind muddle. I'll say it's a mind-muddle.

Alison Stewart: Oh, okay. Thank you.

Rebecca Makkai: Let's say that.

Alison Stewart: You'll hear more of my conversation with author Rebecca Makkai about her novel. I have some questions for you, plus some questions from our audience after a quick break. Stay with us.

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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. We continue our conversation with author and Pulitzer Prize finalist, Rebecca Makkai, about her new novel, I Have Some Questions For You. It was our March Get Lit with All Of It Book Club selection. Thanks to our partners at the New York Public Library, 6,327 of you were able to check out an e-copy to read along with us this month. As always, our readers and audience members had some great questions for the author. You'll hear some of those from our in-person Get Lit event in a moment. First, here's more of my conversation with Rebecca Makkai.

You mentioned this teacher that people had us feeling about, and Bodie's narration is addressed to you, the person she may be suspects is the real killer. We learn his name is Dennis Block pretty early on. How did you decide you wanted this narration to be our way into the story?

Rebecca Makkai: I wish I remember. I wish I remembered.

Alison Stewart: Were there ever other versions?

Rebecca Makkai: No. Here's what it is. I started this, I was at an artist residency. I was at The Ragdoll Foundation near Chicago. I had three weeks to just work. You start, the first day is really long and you're antsy, and then the days get shorter and shorter and shorter and you're working faster and faster. A lot happens in that time and it's all a big blur. It's somewhere in that time I was like, "You throwing all the spaghetti at the wall." Somewhere in that time I was like, "This teacher that I have in mind, what if she's just directing it to him?" I don't know the moment it happened, I can tell you why I kept it, which is it allowed a focal point for her anger for one thing. It allowed a focal point for what information, how much background does she need to give about these people, this school, what can she assume he knows. It's an inverse of something like the, say the Lolita narrative where Humbard Humbard is the only one who gets to talk, and he's talking to her.

In this case, she is talking to this teacher, and it's very important to me that he doesn't get a voice. We meet him in the past, in her memory, but [unintelligible 00:22:34] he doesn't reappear. He doesn't get on the witness stand. He doesn't write her a letter. We do not hear from him. I think he's more powerful in some ways as an absence, but also it felt important to me that she's the one who gets to talk.

Alison Stewart: We discussed MeToo a little bit, but I want to get people caught up. If you haven't read the book yet, you will, I'm sure. Bodie's husband is caught up in a Twitter firestorm when a performance artist claimed the relationship was inappropriate. She was 21 at the time, he was 36. He was a big-deal artist. Bodie isn't really buying into this idea that this was grooming of some kind, and she tweets out, "Are we talking here about the feminism of empowerment or the feminism of victimhood, either a 21-year-old woman is an adult who can make her own decisions, or a helpless wave who needs our protection against big scary men? Which is it? It can't be both." We asked that question about to our readers.

Rebecca Makkai: I was the one tweeting from the bathtub, to be clear here.

Alison Stewart: By the way, that's true. Good point. Was Bodie right to defend her husband? 67% said yes, 33% said no. What did you want to interrogate about how MeToo has made us think about agency?

Rebecca Makkai: I think what art can do that Twitter, for instance, cannot, is really muck around in the gray area. These things are not clear cut. We're talking about human relationships, power. Obviously, there are points on that where it's like, "This is definitely not okay. This is definitely okay, but there's some stuff in the middle." Things that we used to be okay with, and really were okay with, not the hahaha okay with, but really okay with that we're not okay with now.

I think for all of us, there have been things that have come up. In this MeToo era, there's certain stories that come up and you go, "Oh, that's not quite the same." You can't then jump into that on Twitter, for instance, and take a stand, but those are the conversations you might have. One thing that's interesting to me, I will note, at least, I don't see a lot of just random reviews online, but sometimes people tag you on Instagram or something. It seems as if younger people, from what I've seen, feel like what Bode's husband did was really problematic and she shouldn't have defended him, and older people feel like she should have defended him, and it wasn't that bad. It's interesting.

Alison Stewart: The generational difference. We talked about economics. We've just talked about the generational difference. We should point out that the man who is put in prison for this murder is a Black man named Omar, who was the athletic trainer. Thalia is white. Most of the students who pointed the finger were also white as well. They use all kinds of coded language, things that they have absorbed into their skin and spit out in their mouth. What did you want us to consider about race, especially race in the '90s? We all think about it very differently now, hopefully in a more enlightened way, but the '90s were the '90s.

Rebecca Makkai: Yes. What led me, first of all, in that direction, to begin with, is I wanted to write about a case. Not a cold case, but a case that had been "solved" but probably incorrectly. Wrongful incarceration disproportionately affects Black man. That was the direction I wanted to go in. Thinking in particular, that happens everywhere, of course, but in a state like New Hampshire, those differentials, just the ratios of demographics would be very far off from what they'd be, for instance, in New York.

Part of what's going on there is that Bodie is someone who has thought a great deal about systems of power, what institutions are people part of, and she has not managed to really turn an eye back to her own past and do that same thing. Learning not only for her, for other people in the book to acknowledge and examine the institutions that were part of, wittingly or unwittingly, including the ones that harm us, she is part of the institution of this school, even though she felt like an outsider. She's part of the institution of the patriarchy, even though she's also its victim. She's part of the institution of whiteness, she's part of the carceral system. That is a big part of it.

I also, as I really committed to this being, the storyline I was going with, I needed to do a lot of learning about very specifically the New Hampshire legal system and the New Hampshire Carceral system, the New Hampshire State Prison for men, the way that it is next to impossible, if not actually impossible, to get a wrongful conviction even looked at again, let alone overturned. We're also afraid of machines taking over our jobs and we don't realize that we're inside a machine. Race is one of those things, one part of that, along with the carceral system, along with the legal system, but it is connected to all those things by additional tethers.

Alison Stewart: Let's take some questions from the audience.

Speaker 3: Bodie comes back in a teaching role, and I wanted to hear a little bit more about your thoughts on her relationship with her students and her class, and maybe your own relationships with your teachers. You can go with the first one too.

Rebecca Makkai: I had a lot of fun writing this very different generation of students. I don't teach high school. I once filled in someone's maternity leave and taught high school for six weeks. That was a long time ago though. I do end up visiting a lot of high schools. I end up working with a lot of high school students. Then I live on a high school, there's that too.

For Bodie especially just suddenly being dunked back into, "Oh, this is what kids are like now," the contrasts with her generation, and the way that these students talk, is extreme. It's not that they have everything figured out for sure. They overthink some stuff, but they are much more thoughtful people. They are much better trained in being considerate of other people's feelings, and acknowledging power, all those things. That was interesting. I have her as someone, she used to be a film lecturer at UCLA, but she's not a high school teacher. She doesn't really know what she's doing. The things get away from her in several ways, and she doesn't want to come in there and be disciplinary. They're all saying, "Can we have a seance at midnight?" She goes, "Okay." Those students were a lot of fun to write. I think that's one of the points of hope within the book, is that younger generation of students, and the ways that we've evolved socially.

Speaker 4: Hi, I have a question that's going to tip-toe around the ending.

Rebecca Makkai: We'll be cryptic. We'll be very cryptic.

Speaker 4: I thought your decision with the outcome of the trial was very bold. When you were just saying now about how you did research on New Hampshire and the outcomes of trials historically, it made me think how difficult it might be to make a decision like that. As an author, it's stereotypical to want to wrap up a story in a certain way. I was curious, what led you to that decision, and also what were the arguments for the other ending in your mind?

Rebecca Makkai: Good job being cryptic. That was awesome. I was working very closely with a New Hampshire public defender who we were zooming all through COVID talking about the stuff. She was really making me aware of what, not only what was possible, but what was probable. I think she's the only person in the past 150 years or something to get even a hearing for retrial or something in the state of New Hampshire. Maybe she actually got an exoneration. It was something like, but it is absolutely impossible. I did not want to misrepresent our legal system for one thing. There were probably infinite possible outcomes. Someone just comes out and goes, okay, I'm going to tell you what actually happened.

I wanted there to be enough closure for the reader, that this is not a traditional murder mystery, but we have a dead person. By the end of the book, we basically know who did it. I wanted that. I don't think it's very fun to be like, "And we'll never know." That's the message of the book, that you can never know. We've read that already. I wanted some hope, but it was interesting right before the book came out, is when Adnan Syed, speaking of Syria, was freed from prison.

I was very invested in that case as a bystander to that, but that felt like, oh my god, yes, this is the thing that never happens, but maybe. I wanted just enough hope, but I also really wanted realism, and I wanted people to be able to close the book feeling like they had a solid understanding of what had actually gone on without necessarily the legal system fully understanding what had gone on.

Alison: That was my conversation with author and Pulitzer Prize finalist, Rebecca Makkai, about her latest novel, I Have Some Questions For You. It was our March Get Lit With All Of It book club selection.

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