69 pages • 2 hours read
Rebecca MakkaiI Have Some Questions for You
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Cultural Context: True Crime Podcasts and the Search for Justice
Content Warning: This section of the guide features depictions of suicide, self-harm, disordered eating, and sexual assault.
I Have Some Questions for You acknowledges the growing potential of podcasts and other digital media to expose the acts of abusers and solve criminal cases while simultaneously exploring the positive and negative effects that such independent publications may have upon real-life events. Amateurs presenting theories on murders in podcasts can both uncover and potentially obscure the truth, and Rebecca Makkai’s novel demonstrates both possibilities as the intricacies of the plot unfold. In a further example of this approach, the character Dane Rubra’s conspiracy-oriented YouTube videos, while not precisely a podcast, serve similar narrative purposes within the story by creating entertaining alternative interpretations of Thalia’s murder, often in service of truth. Despite these good intentions, Rubra’s search to right past wrongs has unintended consequences. His incendiary content impugns the reputation of Puja Sharma, who dies by suicide two years after Thalia’s murder. While Rubra’s presence proves useful to the novel’s progression, his dubious contributions to justice, like those of Bodie and the other podcasters mentioned in the novel, must be balanced by the pain they inadvertently cause.
Makkai’s tale also highlights the ethical quandaries of sensationalism, for as Beth and other characters in the novel are quick to point out, Bodie’s well-intentioned investigation ultimately results in a measure of personal gain, earning her some condemnation for appearing to leverage Thalia’s death in a “pathetic attention grab” (345). Thus, Bodie’s search for justice is often contradicted by the ill-considered consequences of her own actions, a dynamic that is mirrored by her awkward public responses to her own husband’s issues with accusations of sexual misconduct. In the world of the novel, the truth comes out in the end. However, by penning an ending in which Omar remains wrongfully imprisoned, Makkai also introduces a deliberate lack of resolution that more accurately mirrors real-world prejudices and injustices, ultimately questioning whether podcasts can depict true justice in additional to polarizing true crime.
Authorial Context: Rebecca Makkai
The novel takes place in a residential high school nestled deep in the woods in New Hampshire, and, as Makkai’s final acknowledgements make clear, her own history serves as partial inspiration for Bodie’s experiences as a high school student at Granby. She writes that she has “lived for twenty-one years on the campus of the same boarding school that [she] attended as a day student in the 1990s” (437). As Makkai shares more details of her life in the acknowledgements, she also creates some distance between her own experiences in Chicago and those of Bodie’s in New Hampshire. Although Makkai does not teach at her old alma mater, her husband does, and like Fran and Anne, she does in fact live on campus. These personal details, while nonessential to the reader’s understanding of the novel as a whole, provide a useful glimpse into the nebulous process of worldbuilding that all authors must undergo. Makkai’s choice to build from her own history highlights the common creative impulse to recontextualize one’s own experience and give voice to internal dilemmas and philosophical musings on a grander stage than that of the mind alone.
