Entrepreneurship has its myths. So does memory. In I Have Some Questions for You, Rebecca Makkai builds a narrative that sits squarely in that tension, part page-turner: part excavation of how we remember, revise and sometimes misread our own past.
The novel grew out of a particular moment. "Being old enough to look back on that time from a very different era, being young enough to have teenage kids," she says, created a natural pressure to revisit adolescence with sharper eyes. As the early days of the #MeToo movement unfolded, that instinct deepened. It became, in her words, "an invitation … to look back on the things we once felt we had to tolerate, and to question the power dynamics we lived under."
Set around a boarding school revisited years later, the book is also shaped by Makkai's unusual proximity to place. A graduate of Lake Forest Academy, she later returned when her husband, writer Jon Freeman, joined the faculty, giving her a long, continuous relationship with the same environment many only encounter in memory. That contrast informs her protagonist's perspective and the novel's quiet unease.
Makkai resists the idea that she consciously balances emotional and intellectual storytelling. "If I deeply understand my characters, that's both an intellectual process and an emotional process," she says. "It's hard to separate the two." That instinct shows in a novel that asks not just what happened, but how we decide what is true.
Structurally, the story reinforces that uncertainty. Much of it is addressed to a single figure, creating an intimate, almost confessional tone. Interspersed chapters lay out competing theories of a decades-old crime. The effect is cumulative rather than conclusive, mirroring the way memory builds, fractures and resists easy resolution.
Makkai lives on the North Shore with her family and teaches at Northwestern University. Reading, she argues, remains one of the most reliable ways to stay open in a polarized world. It’s the one medium that "puts you inside someone's head," offering access to perspectives otherwise out of reach. The Midwest, she adds, instills a certain clarity. Less performance, more substance.
In her work, that ethos holds. The questions, as the title suggests, tend to linger.
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