Rebecca Makkai

The riveting new novel from the author of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist The Great Believers

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 Keith, in the spring of their senior year. Though the circumstances surrounding Thalia’s death and the conviction of the school’s athletic trainer, Omar Evans, are hotly debated online, Bodie prefers—needs—to let sleeping dogs lie.

But when the Granby School invites her back to teach a course, Bodie is inexorably drawn to the case and its increasingly apparent ﬂaws. In their rush to convict Omar, did the school and the police overlook other suspects? Is the real killer still out there? As she falls down the very rabbit hole she was so determined to avoid, Bodie begins to wonder if she wasn’t as much of an outsider at Granby as she’d thought—if, perhaps, back in 1995, she knew something that might have held the key to solving the case.

In I Have Some Questions for You, award-winning author Rebecca Makkai has crafted her 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.

A Novel

I Have Some Questions for You

Lindsay

The one where the men finally told about the priests, decades later, and everyone lauded their bravery. The one where the women came forward after five years, and everyone asked why they hadn’t spoken sooner.

no longer felt like a trapdoor to anxiety; it felt more like the single rope on hand as every life raft around me sank. If holding on tight meant staying up till the sky lightened, so be it.

How could any woman truly be shocked by predation?

You don’t have to have been friends with someone to be old friends with them later.

“I don’t blame anyone for believing it. Even now, with my own kids, it’s confusing as hell. I tell them not to believe rumors, and then my daughter is like, But rumors are how we know if someone’s an abuser. She has that vocabulary at twelve, which blows my mind. So I’m supposed to say, Yes, believe those rumors, but not the other ones? Only believe rumors about men?”

But I’d learned long ago not to counter people’s trauma with my own.

I thought of a friend in LA who’d said recently, of her own daughter, “It feels wrong to give her all this happiness and confidence when we know what’s coming. Seventh grade’s gonna hit like a wall. It feels like fattening a pig for slaughter.”

But what was the alternative? Starving the pig?

sina (she/her) 

I know now that for straight boys at that age, it's less about the girl than the competition. Just as soccer isn't about your love of the ball. And once she was declared the object of collective interest, she became the ball.

I wouldn’t say anything else. People would move on. Trump would say something dangerously idiotic any moment now, and everyone’s attention would turn.

“So maybe it’s a lesson learned. Stay off the internet, where everyone’s nuts.”

I Have Some Questions for You quotes

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