Stephanie Vanderslice | April 2021

Rebecca Makkai

After reading Rebecca Makkai’s deeply moving, deeply humane novel The Great Believers I found myself full of questions about process and craft, and so I did what I often do after finishing a book I admire: I began reading and listening to interviews with Makkai talking about her most recent work in order to find the answers. Even after this research, however, I still had some burning questions and decided to chance approaching the author for an interview so I could ask them. Because Makkai is not only an award-winning author but also an eminent and eminently generous literary citizen, she agreed.

Rebecca Makkai is the Chicago-based author of the novels The Great Believers, which won the L.A. Times Book Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, The Hundred-Year House, and The Borrower, as well as the short story collection Music for Wartime. Her short fiction won a 2017 Pushcart Prize, and was chosen for The Best American Short Stories for four consecutive years (2008–2011). The recipient of a 2014 NEA fellowship, Makkai is on the MFA faculties of Sierra Nevada College and Northwestern University, and she is the Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago.

Stephanie Vanderslice: One of the most striking aspects of The Great Believers is the authenticity the book projects, and that it spans so many historical periods. I know you did a lot of research—archival work with newspapers and books and hours of research with people who lived through that time. How would you describe your research process? Is it recursive, that is, did you go back and forth with research and writing or did you get to a point where you decided,“Ok, enough research, now I’m going to write.”

Rebecca Makkai: I really need to research in layers. I started researching around the time I started writing. At first it was shot-in-the-dark internet searches, not really knowing what I was looking for, and it slowly turned into archival research and interviews. But the research continued all through the writing, and sometimes I needed to stop writing because there was information I needed in order to proceed. For instance, I needed to know everything about HIV testing in its earliest years before I could write scenes that related to that in any way. It was going to mess up my timeline if I got the timing of that wrong, so that was the earliest place where I needed to slam on the brakes, talk to some people, find out some basic stuff before I could proceed. But in other cases, I could just leave things blank. I could write a scene not fully knowing all the details at first. One example is a benefit that is depicted early on in the book. At first I didn’t know what it would be a benefit for; I didn’t know where it would be, what it would look like; but I could write the character parts of that scene and fill in the details later. And of course, as I revised, the details of the event became woven into the character reactions. In the earliest drafts, I wrote it a little bit blindly. But that research went on until the very end and even in copyedits I was messaging some of the people I’d interviewed asking them for clarification or further details. Several of the people I interviewed read the book in manuscript form to let me know what mistakes I’d made. Also, all the time I was reading, I was watching things, I was talking to people. I was getting information not necessarily just about specifics, but also about background and texture and emotional reality.

Vanderslice: It’s interesting that you talk about it that way. I think we’re taught, sometimes, that there can be too much research or that you should stop at a certain point and just write. I love how you’re describing this back and forth because it seems like for such a big book that would be just the way it would have to happen. That you couldn’t just load up on a lot of research and then go.

Makkai: Right. There would be instances I had to go back and research because there were things I hadn’t known that I needed. For example, I wouldn’t have predicted that I would have to know all about polar bears at the Lincoln Park Zoo. That came up as I wrote, “Oh, I need to figure out what the layout was, where the polar bears were, and all this stuff.” Also, you don’t know what you don’t need. So, I think if you try to do all your research first, it could be absolutely never-ending, because you’re going to go in every possible direction, you’re going to follow every trail, and it’s never going to stop. There’s always something just adjacent to what you’re learning about that seems like it “might” be important. You’re never going to arrive at a place where you feel like now you’re an expert and you can write. I could have spent years just learning all the medical stuff, things people go to medical school to learn. I could have given myself the equivalent education but, as it was, I only needed to know medical details on two or three specific cases of someone with AIDS—and here’s one way it could go. I didn’t have to know absolutely everything, I just needed to get a few details right. The medical stuff alone would have been endless, and I couldn’t have done the research first on that.

Vanderslice: That kind of answer will help a lot people out there who are writing books like yours. Another novel-craft question. You have a lot of twists and turns here; I’m not going to get any more specific than that out of concern for spoilers. I often get frustrated when I see plot developments coming in a novel. But I was so surprised by the twists and turns in this book. Did they surprise you too? Or did you plot them? You said in an interview that you had a sixty-page outline for The Hundred Year House. Did you have something similar for The Great Believers?

Makkai: I had written the first section of The Hundred Year House, which is set in 1999, thinking that would be the whole novel, and, when I was part-way through, realized that it wasn’t and that I needed to go back in time. So, I’d written that first part in this carefree, intuitive way but when I realized that it needed to go backwards in time I also realized that I needed to do enormous outlining and planning to work out all the rest so that it would resolve honestly, true to “where was this object in this point in time” kind of questions. That is not something I anticipate ever doing again. It was something specific to that book, which was a Rubik’s cube of a book.

I think that was a specific instance, and, generally, my advice to students is usually along the lines of write about a third of the way in along the theme of the initial idea. You’re going to hit a wall anyway, and it’s not a sign that you have a bad book; it’s a sign that it’s time to stop and think about architecture, it’s time to stop and outline. It’s usually about sixty to a hundred pages in that people start thinking, we’re past the initial concept, we’re in the middle, and it’s getting saggy. That’s usually what I do, and that’s what I did this time. I started to outline what would happen. I think it’s really important, within that though, to allow random chance into your work and to surprise yourself. Especially in The Great Believers, which was in so many ways about the invasions of the world, I couldn’t let everything be predetermined and character-driven.

The most dramatic example of this is that I was writing the 2015 sections of the book in 2015, and I was writing that fall about Paris in the fall, and then the terrorist attacks happened as I was writing. That was certainly not something I had plotted because it was not a thing until the day it happened. I decided to keep it in there after a lot of worry and thinking and trying to move timelines. Ultimately, I decided if this was a book about the invasions of the world, the attacks belonged in there. Earlier on, I’d been writing at Yaddo, in upstate New York, when my father-in-law suddenly passed away. I was snowbound and couldn’t get home and had a few days trying to continue to write while I was trying to deal with my kids and my husband at home, understandably very upset, and I was upset too. That was the point where I had a major character die in the manuscript. I hadn’t really known what to do. I didn’t feel like writing; I was sitting there staring at the page and dealing with this sudden death in my own life, and I thought: this was a thing that would happen in the world of the book too, absolutely. And even when death is expected, it comes at you unexpectedly, which is what happens in the book. So I wrote that chapter as my way of letting the true random chance of the real world, of my own life, into the book, rather than trying to come up with something random on my own, which never is that random.

Vanderslice: In one of your interviews, you talk about writing being like a Sudoku puzzle. In another, you talk about the symbolism of character names appearing in a crossword puzzle. I’m sensing that you are drawn to puzzles. How do you think that bears out in your writing?

Makkai: In The Hundred Year House—that was definitely the book that I wrote for myself—it was me indulging; it was me trying to rewrite The Westing Game basically, which was my favorite book as a kid. Just a fun, puzzle kind of thing where you have to work it out as you read. Most of my work is not that coy. Most of my work is not that puzzle-like. But I’m very much interested in everything I write being a mystery, and certainly, obviously not a traditional mystery. But you know, our question in a book should be focused on the past or on the future. It’s usually not great if our questions about a book are focused on the present—like, what’s going on here? But questions of what already happened here, which is where we get traditional mysteries, and questions about what’s about to happen next, which is where we get suspense, in its loosest definition. Those are things that I think we need to have on our minds. As a reader, I get bored when I read books where there aren’t questions raised. Not questions of confusion but questions of plot. I’m always thinking like that, and I’m always thinking in terms of craft, in terms of what’s been promised and what’s been revealed, what’s left up in the air, and why on earth would someone keep reading. There’s a lot of playfulness and magicianship in that, in getting someone hooked, the timing of the way you introduce conflicts, the timing of resolving conflicts, so that someone couldn’t put the book down halfway through and feel satisfied. I’m always asking my students to watch a movie and pause every half hour and ask themselves why they’d be mad if the movie ended right then. It’s really interesting because you usually don’t think along the way about suspense and promise, but if you have to pause the movie, it’s like “oh no, I’d be really pissed off because I don’t know what happens to the dog, and this one subplot isn’t solved yet, then there’s the major thread.” I’m always encouraging them to think like that in their own work. Showing them that this character’s philosophical musings are not enough to carry the book, so why else are we reading? It’s something that does not get talked about enough at all in workshops—that question of: how are we intriguing people, how are we building mystery and intrigue and suspense?

Vanderslice: I’m fascinated by the fact that you have an MA from the Bread Loaf School of English instead of an MFA and you taught in a Montessori School for many years before writing full-time. I’m wondering how coming at your writing from a different direction than a lot of writers do may or may not have influenced your technique and the things that you’re talking about that you see in your students. As you say, those kinds of questions that you’re talking about—suspense and intrigue—aren’t always talked about in a workshop. So do you feel like coming from a different direction influenced you, helped you?

Makkai: I do, actually. Which is not to say that an MFA would have messed me up. I teach in an MFA program, and I’m a big believer in them. I’m also a big believer in the non-MFA model and my main gig is that I’m the artistic director at StoryStudio Chicago, which, like Grub Street or Hugo House, is a nonprofit writing center. But it’s still a workshop model. And I had plenty of workshopping, just to be clear. In undergrad and even high school, I had great workshops, but Middlebury/Bread Loaf’s MA is a nontraditional program. You’re there in the summers, and you can take creative courses as part of it. So I studied poetry with Paul Muldoon and fiction with David Huddle, wonderful instructors of graduate level workshops. But it certainly wasn’t an MFA; it wasn’t all that coursework; I didn’t have a thesis. I think that, if nothing else, I’m interested as an instructor in speaking sometimes a bit more academically about what we’re doing, which is not to say comparing your work to Milton or something but thinking about the craft of it, the architecture of it. Actually, one of the most influential people I studied with at Middlebury was Oskar Eustis, who is the director of the Public Theatre in New York. He developed Hamilton and Angels in America and all these other shows. He doesn’t have a college degree, but he’s one of the smartest people you can ever talk to about literature and the world. That was clear in the way he talked about building a scene in the theatre in the contemporary American theatre class that I took with him, which focused on scene building and architecture. It was completely revelatory, and I think it’s the basis of a lot of the way I write and certainly the way I teach. We don’t need to get bogged down right away in sentences or meaning. We need to be thinking about the big picture first, we need to be thinking about structure. The one thing, and I say this to all my students at the beginning of class—the one thing that a creative writing workshop will teach you wrongly is that you’re owed an audience. Because, as it should be, this is a safe space; this is a work-in-progress; it might not be done; we’re going to be generous; we’re going to read this no matter what. But if you take workshop after workshop again and again, you learn that people will read what you write, which is not usually the case in the world. In the world you have to absolutely woo and earn an audience.

Vanderslice: How do they react to that when you tell them that?

Makkai: They’re usually grateful that I said it, but there’s often a momentary kind of horror. No one sees it as some kind of personal slight. I’m not saying, you personally are not owed an audience, but gosh, you know, this is the one thing that by definition you’re going to get wrong in here. I always tell them—a professor of mine once told me about a professor of his—this goes way back—who would read with two colors of pen, and with one color of pen, he would write his professorial notes and with the other color—because he was also the editor of a literary journal—he would draw a line where he would have stopped reading as an editor. I always joke that I am volunteering to do this, but it’s something I would never actually do.

Vanderslice: It’s funny, I’ve asked students, “who do you think your audience is?” And I’ve had more than a few students say that they don’t think about their audience. Which is, I think, a veiled way of saying you’re writing for yourself.

Makkai: I understand, “I don’t think about my audience,” because for other books, in the past, I haven’t had a clear picture in mind of who my audience would be. I certainly had a “hoped for” audience and had some idea of readers and other writers and booksellers and things like that. Usually, when people ask me who’s your audience, I’m thinking, “I don’t know.” But this book was very different. Because I think I had two groups that I had to write with, two specific groups in mind, one of which was survivors of the AIDS epidemic, either survivors of HIV or people who lost friends or who were there in the thick of it. They know this time so much better than I do, and I needed to make sure this rang true for them and be accurate and make sense and do it justice. And then the other group was readers who had no knowledge of that world at all—so a straight, white, female college student who’s twenty right now, who’s vaguely heard of AIDS before. And I needed to be getting the information in there so that a person like that would understand. I have to be speaking to both groups at the same time. As well as everyone in between. It can’t be didactic for the college student’s benefit and bore the crap out of people who were there. And it can’t be elliptical for the sake of the people who were there and confuse the college student. It gets really complicated. It’s kind of funny because, when you get out into the actual world, you meet your audience, and it’s not who you thought you were writing for. Who knows? We have some idea in our head—if we really broke it down—of our former college professors, bookstore people—but when we really get out in the world, it’s cool book club ladies, and it’s everyone in the world, but it’s probably not the exact people you had in your subconscious.

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Stephanie Vanderslic’s recent book, The Geek’s Guide to the Writing Life: An Instructional Memoir for the Rest of Us, was named a top writing book for 2018. She has also published Can Creative Writing Really Be Taught,10th Anniversary edition (coedited with Rebecca Manery). Director of the Arkansas Writer’s MFA Workshop and Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Central Arkansas, her fiction, creative nonfiction, and creative criticism have appeared in several venues.

Excerpt

from The Great Believers

Twenty miles from here, twenty miles north, the funeral mass was starting. Yale checked his watch as they walked up Belden. He said to Charlie, “How empty do you think that church is?” Charlie said, “Let’s not care.”

The closer they got to Richard’s house, the more friends they spotted heading the same way. Some were dressed nicely, as if this were the funeral itself; others wore jeans, leather jackets. It must only be relatives up at the church, the parents’ friends, the priest. If there were sandwiches laid out in some reception room, most were going to waste.

Yale found the bulletin from last night’s vigil in his pocket and folded it into something resembling the cootie catchers his childhood friends used to make on buses—the ones that told your fortune (“Famous!” or “Murdered!”) when you opened a flap. This one had no flaps, but each quadrant bore words, some upside down, all truncated by the folds: “Father George H. Whitb”; “beloved son, brother, rest in”; “All things bright and”; “lieu of flowers, donation.” All of which, Yale supposed, did tell Nico’s fortune. Nico had been bright and beautiful. Flowers would do no good. The houses on this street were tall, ornate. Pumpkins still out on every stoop but few carved faces—artful arrangements, rather, of gourds and Indian corn. Wrought iron fences, swinging gates. When they turned onto the walkway to Richard’s (a noble brownstone sharing walls with noble neighbors), Charlie whispered: “His wife decorated the place. When he was married. In ’72.” Yale laughed at the worst possible moment, just as they passed a gravely smiling Richard holding open his own door. It was the idea of Richard living a hetero life in Lincoln Park with some decoratively inclined woman. Yale’s image of it was slapstick: Richard stuffing a man into the closet when his wife dashed back for her Chanel clutch. Yale pulled himself together and turned back to Richard. He said, “You have a beautiful place.” A wave of people came up behind them, pushing Yale and Charlie into the living room.

Inside, the decor didn’t scream 1972 so much as 1872: chintz sofas, velvety chairs with carved arms, oriental rugs. Yale felt Charlie squeeze his hand as they dove into the crowd.

 

From The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2018 by Rebecca Makkai Freeman.