Rebecca Makkai drew from #MeToo and true crime to craft her latest novel

I Have Some Questions for You, the latest novel from author Rebecca Makkai, could be read as a psychological thriller that examines how memory works, a whodunnit, or a feminist novel. This malleability, the ability to write without adhering to preconceived notions of what her work will be, is woven into Makkai’s process.

“Form definitely follows function, and genre tends to follow function too,” Makkai tells Pittsburgh City Paper. “And theme kind of rises mysteriously out of all of that. I never go in with that broader plan of what I want something to be, partly because that’s not the order I think of things in."

I Have Some Questions for You (Viking) follows Bodie Kane, a film producer/podcaster who returns to her New England boarding school to teach a class. While there, she revisits the 1995 murder of a classmate and enlists current students to investigate the case, including questioning the innocence of the school athletic trainer convicted for the crime.

Makkai, who appears on Mon., Dec. 11 as a guest of the Pittsburgh Arts and Lectures Ten Evenings series, started I Have Some Questions for You as the #MeToo movement was cresting. Published in February, Makkai wasn’t quite sure what the reaction would be to a story that tapped into the mood of that era.

Surprisingly, Makkai heard from a lot of men, some former high school and college classmates, who were shaken by the book.

“Of course, quite predictably, I had a lot of women saying they related to so much of what was going on,” Makkai says. “But I think men … because #MeToo was so public and so sudden and maybe so scary for a lot of them — this idea of `Oh my god, what did I do, what could women be mad at me for’ — a novel that explores the same topics helped them to do more soul-searching in an interesting way. The reactions ranged from `Oh my god, I hope I never acted like that,' and, of course, it’s never the person who’s going to read a novel who is most likely to have done something."

She adds that people reached out saying they had witnessed something in the 1970s and never said anything, but that the book pushed them to investigate those incidents further. "And that was a surprise,” she adds.

Makkai’s previous books include The Great Believers, a Pulitzer Prize finalist set during the AIDs epidemic; her debut, The Borrower, about a librarian who becomes a kidnapper when she tries to help a young boy; and the short-story collection Music for Wartime.

If there’s a through line in Makkai’s fiction, it’s her interest in the passage of time, “and, of course, memory is usually going to be a part of that,” she says.

“And I’m genuinely fascinated by memory in real life and subjectivity, especially when enough time has passed. You compare notes with someone else who was there when you’re talking about things that happened 20 or 30 years ago, and you have very, very different takeaways in terms of what happened," she explains.

For that reason, she believes I Have Some Questions for You is not a book she could have written when she was 25.

"It is so much about distance, and for that reason — and obviously, I’m not looking back from age 80 — but I did give Bodie my high school graduation year. Partly that was a matter of cultural touchstones, making it easier for myself in terms of what were they listening to? What did they care about? What were they wearing?" says Makkai.

She adds that another consideration for the time frame of the novel is that now, in her mid-40s, she’s been an adult longer than she’s been a child.

“You have changed enough, the times have changed enough, and your kids, you are looking at them coming into a world that in many ways is fundamentally different from the one you came of age in,” Makkai says.

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Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures presents Rebecca Makkai. 7:30 p.m. Mon., Dec. 11. Carnegie Library Lecture Hall. 4400 Forbes Ave., Oakland. $18 for online tickets. pittsburghlectures.org