"Every novel is a mystery," said author Rebecca Makkai, on the phone from her home outside Chicago. "It's a mystery about the future — what's going to happen next — which is most books. Or maybe a mystery about the present: what's really going on here, who am I really. Or maybe a mystery about the past: what already happened here, what I am looking at. That kind of mystery seemed to fit best with a story that was going to be fundamentally about someone looking back at their time at a boarding school."
Makkai, whose 2018 novel, "The Great Believers," won multiple awards including the ALA Carnegie Medal, is talking about her just-published new book: "I Have Some Questions for You," in which a film professor and true-crime podcaster revisits the boarding school she attended as a teen — and reconsiders the tragic murder of a classmate 20 years ago, for which the wrong man may be sitting in prison.
"I Have Some Questions for You" is an intoxicating read: an elegant dive into crime fiction; a timely meditation on fascination with true crime (and on whose stories get told); a woman's poignant journey into her past, in which she finds that the years have changed the light that illuminates her life's stories; an examination of what happens to friendships made while young and not yet formed. And although the novel is pure fiction, for Makkai it represented a journey into both her past and her present: She attended a Chicago-area boarding school as a day student, and now lives and raises her children on the grounds of that same school, where her husband is on the faculty.
