True Crime and the #MeToo Movement

American literature never runs out of literary talents and superstars who captivate the world over. Among this throng of literary talents is Rebecca Makkai who has recently been earning global recognition for her works. She started her literary career writing short stories which were even anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011. Makkai is also known for her full-length prose, with The Borrower (2011) being her first novel. It was a resounding success as it earned Makkai praises from literary pundits and readers alike. However, it was her third novel, The Great Believers, an intricate chronicle of the AIDS pandemic that made her a household name. Published in 2018, The Great Believers was a finalist for both the National Book Award for Fiction and the highly-heralded Pulitzer Prize in Fiction.  

The success of The Great Believers made readers and literary pundits look forward to more of her works. Her long-awaited literary comeback came in 2023 with the publication of I Have Some Questions For You. At the heart of Makkai’s fourth novel was Bodie Kane who, in the contemporary, was a film professor at UCLA. She has also established her mettle as a podcaster hosting Starlet Fever, a channel that documented the lives and love affairs of classic movie stars, including the history of abuse and harassment in early Hollywood. She was currently residing in Los Angeles with her two children. While her career was blossoming, her marital life has withered. Her estranged husband Jerome was living next door and their break-up was amicable.

The crux of the novel, however, was when she headed back to New Hampshire to teach a two-week course of film studies and podcasting to the students of her boarding school, Granby. She studied at Granby in the 1990s. However, teaching was not her only goal in her homecoming to her alma mater. During her senior year. the lifeless body of her roommate, Thalia Keith, was found; she was murdered. A suspect was immediately arrested and subsequently convicted. However, the circumstances surrounding the suspect’s arrest were shrouded in a veil of suspicion. While some were satisfied with the swift quest for justice, several were skeptical of how the investigation was handled and its output.

“The irony being: I was steeped in irony. I was the one whose entire attendance at Granby felt ironic. I was the one whose clothes and posters were ironic. Whereas they (I believed) sailed through life sincerely, with their layered haircuts and North Face and plaid miniskirts. So when I replied with “Oh my God, you too,” even though the girl in question was wearing her lacrosse uniform, I enjoyed the look of confusion, then the unsubtle roll of eyes Beth would share with Rachel.“

~ Rebecca Makkai, I Have Some Questions For You

Bodie, in particular, was not satisfied with how the case of Thalia was conveniently resolved despite the pieces of evidence gathered primarily circumstantial. Because of her proximity to Thalia, Bodie held a deep personal interest in revisiting the facts of the case despite her reluctance to revisit memories of her days at Granby. In 2016, two years before her homecoming, someone anonymously sent Bodie a video recording of their class performance of Camelot which was taped right before Thalia’s untimely demise and in which Thalia played the role of the Lady of the Lake. When Britt, one of her students, proposed to craft a podcast reexamining the events that led to Thalia’s murder, Bodie went all in.

Under Bodie’s tutelage, the facts and the circumstances surrounding Thalia’s murder were slowly unrolled. The reexamination of the murder case brought to the fore questions surrounding the circumstantial case against Omar Evans, the school’s African American athletic trainer. At the time of the murder, the police force was able to swiftly build a case against Evans as his DNA and other circumstantial pieces of evidence were uncovered at the crime scene. He was also close to the murder scene. It did not help Evans that he initially confessed to the crime before recanting his confession shortly later. Shedding a light into the case only brought out more questions such as the identity of the real killer and the possibility of him or her still being at large.

As the story moved forward, the present intermingled with the past as the case was examined through the lenses of Bodie. Thalia, dark-haired and charismatic, was the class beauty. She was the popular girl even though she was a transferee during their junior year. She was the antithesis of Bodie who was undergoing a goth phase. She tagged herself as part of the weird group, an outsider who separated herself from the mainstream crowd. It was simply no weird phase for Bodie. Growing up in a household in Indiana altered by tragedy, her childhood was marked by the tragic death of her father which was succeeded by her mother falling into depression; Bodie herself experienced depression. Bodie was then abandoned by her mother to the care of a Mormon family, the Robesons, who were instrumental in Bodie attending Granby.

Meanwhile, Britt created more content related to the podcast. Her own sleuthing uncovered rumors about Thalia having affairs with an older man. The initial probe into Thalia’s personal life pointed to Omar being the older man in question. However, as the murk started to settle, it was increasingly becoming palpable that Omar was not the older man Thalia was having an affair with. This revelation broke the case wide open as the flimsy threads that once held the case together were being snipped, unveiling what was possibly a case of racism and racial policing. Wrongful convictions against African Americans, after all, have been historically statistically higher compared to white Americans. A 2022 report noted that innocent African Americans were seven times more likely to be wrongly convicted of murder than innocent white Americans.

“What’s as perfect as a girl stopped dead, midformation? Girl as blank slate. Girl as reflection of your desires, unmarried by her own. Girl as sacrifice to the idea of girl. Girl as a series of childhood photographs, all marked with the aura of girl who will die young, as if even the third grade portrait photographer should have seen it written on her face, that this was a girl who would only ever be a girl.“

~ Rebecca Makkai, I Have Some Questions For You

The case of Thalia also brought to the fore one of the recent social movements that swept the world over, the #MeToo Movement. The rise of this movement allowed victims of sexual exploitation and abuse to speak openly about their experiences without fear of reprisal from institutions and individuals that shield predators from justice. The movement manifested in different forms, with Bodie resurrecting her memory reminiscent of how victims resurrect their own: “looking at their ugly backsides, the filthy facets long hidden.” As the movement hit close to home, Bodie found herself furious at the double standards apropos sexist treatment. Women are expected to shrug off, worse, laugh off these different forms of harassment.

The violation of personal space takes in various forms. Women and young girls are often the subject of the punch lines of crude jokes. Some were even physically groped. When abusers were confronted, they deflected the issue at hand by gaslighting women. The abused are expected to laugh it off. The boys at Granby even devised a game called Thalia Bingo which was essentially a form of harassment. Grooming was also underscored in the story. It was an Eureka moment for the adult Bodie who finally pierced the layers of gaslighting. The #MeToo movement hit Bodie close to home when her estranged husband also faced allegations of lewd behavior from a younger performance artist who alleged that Jerome used his power and position to sexually manipulate her. To amplify the novel’s message, Makkai referenced recent and actual news of the different crimes that are committed against women.

The novel also prominently and subtly highlights the pivotal role social media plays in our lives. Twitter, YouTube, and Spotify, among others, were repeatedly referenced in the story. Several, particularly celebrities, have been receiving online backlash even for just minor mistakes. True crime has also trickled into social media as online sleuths endeavor to become paragons of justice. Podcast channels have become vessels for shedding new light on cold cases. Some real-life murder cases were even solved by true crime podcasts. It seems that Makkai’s latest novel was trudging the same path while, at the same time, highlighting the growing role of social media in amplifying seminal social discourses.

The presence of social media, however, serves to complicate matters. In the words of Makkai, social media users and true-crime obsessives are “inserting themselves into someone else’s story.” Everyone wants a share of that internet fame. Clout-chasers are ubiquitous, blurring the lines between personal interest and the genuine quest for justice. Moreover, the novel highlighted how internet mobs can adversely impact and alter lives, both of the guilty and the innocent, underlining how online consumers are no mere passive spectators. While online discourses can result in positive outcomes, they also result in extreme backlashes. For instance, Jerome lost his job due to relentless and veiled online attacks on Twitter. The damage from these allegations also trickled into Bodie’s podcast channel.

“We get so used to twenty-four-year-old actors playing high school students, and we seem so mature in our own memories, that we forget actual teenagers have limited vocabularies, have bad posture and questionable hygiene, laugh too loud, don’t know how to dress for their body types, want chicken nuggets and macaroni for lunch. It’s easier to see the twelve-year-olds they just were than the twenty-year-olds they’ll soon be.”

~ Rebecca Makkai, I Have Some Questions For You

I Have Some Questions for You is, at its heart, a work of mystery fiction where the advances in technology converged with the poignancy and heartbreaks of memory. It is about the pursuit of an elusive and complicated truth. As the mystery deepens, secrets, red herrings, and suspicions abound. There was also a probe into traumatic history contrasted by the opulent world of the privileged. The novel was also a probe into our growing and alarming fascination with true crime. Meanwhile, unlikeable characters were interspersed in the story. Contemporary cultural touchstones gave the novel a complexion of present relevance while, at the same time, subtly underscoring the generational contrasts. Gen Z shared their pronouns while openly talking about clinical depression, a far cry from Bodie’s time when such subjects were frowned upon.

Overall, I Have Some Questions For You is an immersive work of mystery. Makkai, however, deviates from the mainstream and the formulaic. She wove various pieces into a complex but lush tapestry. Just when the readers have the perpetrator figured out, Makkai pulls the rug, preventing the readers from deriving the complete satisfaction of a cleanly served justice. Rather, the readers were coaxed into filling in the gaps and weaving all the pieces together. The final piece, however, was abstract, brimming with holes that left the readers with more questions than answers. After all, I Have Some Questions For You. Nevertheless, there is a derivative joy in fitting all of the pieces of the puzzle together. There were no concessions but it was still a compelling read that examined a timely and seminal subject with a universal voice.

“My instinct in these situations is to sit back and listen and learn—but they were looking at me like I was supposed to solve it all. This was fragile, and these were fragile kids. And I felt derailed: I’d spilled this idea about you, and it had just vanished into a fog of adolescent angst and white guilt.”

~ Rebecca Makkai, I Have Some Questions For You
Book Specs

Author: Rebecca Makkai
Publisher: Viking
Publishing Date: 2023
Number of Pages: 435
Genre: Crime, Suspense

Synopsis

A successful film professor and podcaster, Bodie Kane is content to forget her past – the family tragedy that marred her adolescence, her four largely miserable years at a New Hampshire boarding school, and the murder of her former roommate, Thalia Ketih, in the spring of their senior year. Though the circumstances surrounding Thalia’s death and the guilt of the school’s athletic trainer, Omar Evans, are hotly debated online, Bodie prefers – needs – to let sleeping dogs lie. But when she’s invited back to teach a course, Bodie falls down the very rabbit hole she was so determined to avoid. She begins to wonder if the wrong man was convicted, and if, perhaps, back in 1995, she knew something that might have held the key to solving the case.

I Have Some Questions for You is award-winning author Rebecca Makkai’s most irresistible novel yet: a stirring investigation into collective memory and a deeply felt examination of one woman’s reckoning with her past, with a transfixing mystery at its heart. Timely, hypnotic, and populated with a cast of unforgettable characters, I Have Some Questions for You is at once a compulsive page-turner and a literary triumph.

About the Author

Rebecca Makkai was born on April 20, 1978, to linguistics professors Valerie Becker Makkai and Ádám Makkai. Her father was a Hungarian refugee who moved to the United States following the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Her paternal grandmother, Rózsa Ignácz, was a well-known actress and novelist in Hungary. Makkai was raised in Lake Bluff, Illinois. She graduated from Lake Forest Academy and completed her B.A. in English at Washington and Lee University. She earned her master’s degree from Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English. 

Makkai’s literary career started with short stories that were anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011 as well as in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009 and 2016. In 2011, her debut novel, The Borrower, was published. She followed it up with her sophomore novel, The Hundred-Year House in 2014. While her first two novels earned her critical success, it was The Great Believers (2018) that made her a household name. The Great Believers won the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and was a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. It earned Makkai several accolades. Her latest novel, I Have Some Questions for You, was published in 2023.

Makkai also published a collection of short stories, Music for Wartime, in 2015. Her short stories have also appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Tin House, The Threepenny Review, New England Review, and Shenandoah. Her nonfiction works have appeared in Harpers, Salon.com, and The New Yorker website. She also received a 2017 Pushcart Prize, a 2014 NEA fellowship, and a 2022 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. She also taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is on the MFA faculties of Sierra Nevada University and Northwestern University. She is the artistic director of StoryStudio Chicago. She also taught at Lake Forest College and held the Mackey Chair in Creative Writing at Beloit College in Wisconsin.

Makkai is currently residing in Lake Forest, Illinois, with her husband and their two children.