‘Some Questions’ for her
Rebecca Makkai (Photo by Larry D. Moore, Wikimedia Commons) An interview with Rebecca Makkai GREGG SHAPIRO | Contributing WriterGreggShapiro@aol.com Beginning with her first book, 2011’s The Borrower and continuing with her 2015 short story collection Music For Wartime, novelist and straight ally Rebecca Makkai has created some of the most unforgettable queer characters in contemporary fiction.
This inclusion reached a crescendo with 2018’s award-winning and acclaimed novel The Great Believers, about a group of gay friends in 1985 Chicago as AIDS was beginning to make its impact felt on the city.
In Makkai’s new novel, I Have Some Questions For You (Viking, 2023), she not only features characters that are lesbian and nonbinary, she manages to perfectly illustrate the present mood with podcasts and COVID figuring prominently in the story.
Makkai will be in Dallas Tuesday, Feb. 28, in conversation with Ben Fountain at Dallas Museum of Art, and she was gracious enough to answer a few questions before the February 2023 publication of the novel. Gregg Shapiro: Rebecca, the last time I interviewed you was in 2018 right before your third novel, The Great Believers, was published.
