Author Rebecca Makkai’s new book asks, ‘Who really has the power?’
Gabfest Reads is a monthly series from the hosts of Slate’s Political Gabfest podcast. Recently, Emily Bazelonspoke with author Rebecca Makkai about how the #MeToo years impacted a large portion of her new book, I Have Some Questions For You.
This partial transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Emily Bazelon: One of the ways I think this book subverts expectations is, part of the way through the book, Bodie’s ex-husband has an experience with being canceled via Twitter for a consensual relationship he had when he was younger—but not super young—with someone who was an adult in her early 20s. He is an artist. She was working at a gallery where his art was being presented and shown. You do a really interesting job of sketching this kind of cancel-culture moment that different people have very strong opinions about going in different directions. It’s a really interesting juxtaposition to a lot of the much more straightforward kind of feminist, righteous outrage in the book. Tell me about how you came up with that episode and what you’re doing there and what you want, just how you thought about it.
Rebecca Makkai: Well, my job is to create complication. My job is to ask questions or to take questions I already had and then mess them up even more. I definitely never want to go into a book feeling like I have a point to prove or I have some lesson for people; I have the answers for people. I’m never interested in that. So, in this case, the big questions on the table included abusive power in sexual relationships or romantic relationships when there’s a big age differential—that’s part of it—and also holding people accountable for their actions in the past. I wanted to include something that was not as easy, not as simple. That’s one of the main reasons it even crept in there to begin with was I was seeing these things happen in the literary world, in other public sectors. After that initial wave of #metoo, people being called out for things that, in some cases, were not illegal, but it’s gross, and in other cases, things that some of us look at and go, “Well, I don’t see what the problem is.” Is an age differential really this huge issue in a relationship when we’re talking about an adult woman who we’d like to think could make her own choices?
That was something that was on my mind. It was something that I was talking with friends about quite a lot in the time I was writing this book as different situations came up. So, it crept in because it was just something I was stewing over. There are a lot of things that creep in because they’re on your mind, but you keep the things that creep in and then speak to other elements of the book. That keep the things that work in this echo chamber. That’s basically what happened. That’s why I kept it was, this is actually doing things here. Also, it’s throwing my main character, it’s throwing Bodie, off balance to simultaneously be looking back and wanting to call people out for their actions in the past, but then to see a situation where she feels like she’d rather defend the person being accused.
I think it succeeds both as plot and theme. You’re creating a hard case, a case that’s full of gray area and that people can disagree about, a case that really could be pulled from Twitter. I think you did a great original job with the details, but it felt very possible to me. Then it’s a different vantage point from thinking about the murder of Thalia Keith and this inappropriate relationship she had with this music teacher. I really hate the word “inappropriate.” I should have come up with something better. It’s so stiff and starchy and doesn’t really say anything. This deeply troubling relationship. I think that there is something very interesting here about feminist agency or really just female agency that the difference between age and power differential, the difference in the details is everything, in a sense, right?
There are so many different kinds of power. Of course, the problem is it’s all a huge gray area. That’s one of the reasons that we don’t examine all of those when we talk about predatory relationships or imbalanced relationships. But there are differentials of things like money. There are differentials of success, differentials of advancement within a certain career. There are differences. Certainly gender, certainly age, but also intelligence, also experience, also attractiveness, to be frank.
It’s not as if both parties in a relationship experience that power balance the same way. So often people in a relationship, both people feel the other one is the person with all the power. The way that as Bodie rather looks back on what she knows about this relationship between this 30-something music teacher and this senior in high school, she imagines that he, the music teacher, probably didn’t feel like he was the one with all the power. He probably felt like, “I’m staking everything for you. You’re the one in control.” She goes through different versions of that, including wondering actually if he actually took her life, wondering if something else happened. But the way that we can see a relationship from the outside based just on, say, demographic details is one thing, and the way it looks to people on the inside is quite another.
Of course, there is a black and white component to this where someone underage who is a student and someone who is an adult, who is an instructor, that is absolutely inappropriate in just about everyone’s book, including mine. Even so, there’s just still more to think about. There’s more to examine. When we really try to get in the heads of the people involved in something like that, there are more questions than just, “how dare you?” That is a huge question. But my job as the author is not just to pass judgment. In fact, maybe it’s not to pass judgment at all. I can do that as a person, but as an author, my job is to get in people’s heads.
