I Have Some Questions for You: Discussion Guide + Resources
About the Book
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.
You can read more and get your copy here.
About the Author
Rebecca Makkai’s last novel, The Great Believers, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; it was the winner of the ALA Carnegie Medal, the Stonewall Book Award, the Clark Prize, and the LA Times Book Prize; and it was one of the New York Times’ Ten Best Books of 2018. Her other books are the novels The Borrower and The Hundred-Year House, and the collection Music for Wartime—four stories from which appeared in The Best American Short Stories. A 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, Rebecca is on the MFA faculties of the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe and Northwestern University, and is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago.
Discussion Questions
1. Several characters in I Have Some Questions for You reflect on their adolescent selves—versions of themselves that feel at once remote and familiar. Do you think it’s possible, with enough distance, for any of us to see our high school selves clearly?
2. True crime media has become exceedingly popular in recent years. Why do you think fans of the genre find it so fascinating and even therapeutic to dissect such gruesome events? What considerations factor into being an ethical creator or consumer of true crime media?
3. Bodie’s husband, Jerome, is publicly accused of predatory behavior in a relationship with a younger woman. Were you surprised by the way Bodie handles the allegations?
4. On p. 174, Bodie thinks, “Every article about Thalia’s death had fixated on how Thalia and Robbie were the perfect prep school couple, moneyed and talented and privileged, and Omar Evans—no mention of his mother working at Dartmouth—was this outsider. That made the best narrative.” How does the novel’s setting shape the story, both past and present? How does prejudice and the idea of the “outsider” function at Granby and in the novel as a whole?
5. Throughout the novel, we are reminded of how many stories of violence against women we regularly encounter on the news, on social media, and in pop culture—the contours of the cases hauntingly familiar even as locations and details differ. What was the cumulative effect of these references as you read? How did they inform your understanding of what happened to Thalia?
6. Did this novel subvert or expand your knowledge of the criminal justice system? If so, how? What do you predict for the future of Omar’s case?
7. Whom did you personally suspect over the course of the novel? Did your judgment ever differ from Bodie’s? What surprised you the most as Bodie’s understanding of the case evolved?
Additional Resources
'I Have Some Questions for You:' Author Interview with Rebecca Makkai | Boise State Public Radio
Rebecca Makkai Jumps into the “Messy Tar Pit” of True Crime (bustle.com)
By the Book Interview: Rebecca Makkai - The New York Times (nytimes.com)