It's hard to be a book lover and not be aware of Rebecca Makkai. Her five books take on a wide variety of topics and have been translated into over twenty languages. She is perhaps best known for The Great Believers, which was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
Ms. Makkai, who earned an MA in literature from Middlebury College's Bread Loaf School of English, began her writing career while working as an elementary Montessori teacher. She now teaches graduate fiction writing at Middlebury College, Northwestern University, and the Bennington Writing Seminars, and she also serves as the artistic director of StoryStudio Chicago. Despite this full schedule, she continues to publish short stories, which can be found seemingly everywhere, including The Best American Short Stories series, as well as literary magazines such as The Paris Review, The Pushcart Prize, and The New Yorker.
At the end of January 2025, Ms. Makkai visited Butler University, where she gave a reading, took questions and spoke briefly about her next novel, which will focus on the year 1938. After the reading, she sat down for an interview with Booth, where she spoke about writing across difference, cancel culture, and Zillow weirdness.
Susan Lerner (SL): One of the reasons I’m excited to talk with you is that in the early 90s, I worked as a pharmacist in Chicago for the Walgreens in Boystown. Reading The Great Believers gave me a chance to walk back into those memories.
Rebecca Makkai (RM): I’m so glad.
SL: It made me wonder if you’ve received this kind of feedback from other people in similar situations.
RM: It’s been amazing to hear readers’ breadth of experience related to this. I’ve had such vociferous support from the people who’ve lived through this directly: gay men of that age in Chicago. That’s the group I was the most concerned about. That was a giant relief and really heartening.
I hear about such a variety of experiences from that time. “I was living in the suburbs raising my kids in the eighties, and I had no idea.” And you think, “Well, you should have known, right?” Queer college students saying, “Why didn’t we get taught this in school? I just learned about it from your book.” Which is alarming. But then you get people who go, “I worked in fashion, I lost fifteen friends.” Or people who go, “I’ve been living with HIV since 1987,” or “I lost my brother.” You get this sense of two Americas where on one side people are screaming for help and on the other nobody’s paying attention. The one that really gets me, is “Isn’t it great that we’ve cured it?” Oh honey, we’ve got 1.1 million Americans living with HIV. We have not cured it. Things are better, obviously, but there are still a lot of problems and they’re about to get much worse.
SL: I know that you have addressed the issue of writing someone else’s story in your Lit Hub essay, “Writing Across Difference.” I’m curious, when The Great Believers was published, was there much hoopla around this topic?
RM: There was next to nothing. And it’s interesting because American Dirt was the next year, and there was such drama around it. I have not read American Dirt, so I can’t really speak to that with authority. I do think all those conversations have been hugely important and helpful. But no one is saying to anyone, “You’re not allowed to write that,” at least at this point in history. Like “Literally, you’re not allowed to write that, it’s illegal. You can’t.” The question is, if you write it, first, will anyone publish it, and secondly, how will it be received?
SL: I think there are people saying you shouldn’t be writing it.
RM: Well of course “should” is a different question. And you get some people saying you should never write across gender or race or class or religion in any way, which makes novels impossible. It gets so complicated because writing across gender and sexuality is often less fraught than writing across race, especially if you’re specifically writing about racial issues. I’m not saying one’s okay and the other’s not, I’m just saying there tends to be more of a response from one.
The thing is, if you’re writing fiction, you are always going to be writing about people of other identities. If you don’t, that starts to look like erasure. I’m not going to write a book and fill it entirely with white, college-educated, straight women. That’s bananas, right? That’s not the world we live in. So, you’re going to be doing this, and the question is, can you do it responsibly? There are always going to be people out there—twenty-two-year-olds on the internet—going, “You should only ever tell #OwnVoices stories.” It’s not the actual book world. There are people who, much more rationally, are saying, “This is a highwire act. If you’re going to do this, you’d better nail it, or you’re going to have a lot of problems and you’re going to create problems in the world.” Then there are people who might say, “I just don’t want to read something by someone who didn’t live through it”—which is a different side of the coin, and if that’s what someone wants to consume, that’s their right. As long as you’re reading!
But essentially there are books—mine is absolutely not the only one—where people have written wildly across difference and have not run into pushback. I believe, or I hope, that it’s because of the research done, the sense of responsibility, and a lot of other factors. And I did five years of research alongside five years of writing, which was absolutely essential. Most of the books where people have written across difference and something serious comes back at them, and really catches on as legitimate criticism, and it’s not just one guy on Instagram, it seems to be where people are pointing out things they actually got wrong. Places where they said things that were inadvertently offensive. Places where they talked about something that wouldn’t have happened that way, or used the wrong terminology, or reinforced a negative stereotype. Books that get real, thoughtful pushback, there are usually reasons. The pushback on American Dirt was not, “You’re not allowed to write about Mexico because you’re not Mexican.” It was, “Hey, you tried to write this, and you got this list of things wrong. And the fact that you’re not Mexican is part of the problem.”
SL: And then there was that other book by Amélie Wen Zhao, Blood Heir.
RM: Okay, I vaguely remember that. It was a long time ago.
SL: Maybe a Sci-fi or YA book? They withdrew it, but then went ahead to publish it. I don’t recall the specific details.
RM: Well, I will say in the YA world, which I think that was, or fantasy, which kind of crosses over into the YA world, there are different rules. A portion of the YA reading public is very quick to cancel people. I wouldn’t go near the YA community with a ten-foot pole. It’s not actual teenagers doing this. It’s like twenty-five-year-olds or thirty-five-year-olds who primarily read YA, who are just very quick to snap people’s heads off. In some cases, there actually was an offense that was a problem, but in other cases, people haven’t even read the book. The book’s just been announced with one sentence from the marketing intern, and they’re going to Goodreads-bomb the person based on that. That kind of thing can happen in the adult world too, but in the YA and fantasy worlds—and as they combine—it seems especially brutal.
SL: The Great Believers brought you so many accolades. Among many other honors and awards, it was a finalist for both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. How did all that affect you?
RM: If you look back at the arc of my career, it seems like that happened very suddenly. And it did, in a certain sense. But also just day by day it happened very slowly, where you’re kind of absorbing things one at a time. It didn’t really hit me until I was on tour for my next book, I Have Some Questions for You. I would be standing backstage, and someone onstage would read my bio. They’d list all these things, and I’d go, “Oh my god, that happened to me?” It was healthy for me that I’d already started my next book when that stuff was happening.
SL: Why is that?
RM: Because I wasn’t sitting there facing a blank page going, “Now I have to top that, in some way.” My next book is a very different topic. It’s essentially a murder mystery. I wasn’t trying to do the same things. I was not thinking, “I was a Pulitzer finalist, this time I’m going to gun for the Pulitzer.” It was, “I’m going to write a real page-turning murder mystery.”
SL: What a great way to proceed.
RM: Right. There’s also the fact that COVID-19 was in the middle of all this. Originally, in the beginning of 2020, I was going to have a lot of travel to Europe for The Great Believers. A lot of the translations were coming out that summer. People in Europe ended up latching onto it in this very different way, as this is a novel about an epidemic. Suddenly there were Zooms. All my travel was canceled, but where I was just going to visit a couple of European festivals, suddenly I’m on Zoom with like the Warsaw Book Club. And then in the U.S. people were reading more. They’d had the book longer, but the word was spreading about it in an interesting way. It didn’t feel real because I was at home doing inadequate homeschooling, not witnessing it first-hand, because Zoom doesn’t really feel real.
For The Great Believers, we worried about bookstore turnout. “Are there going to be enough people in Seattle who are going to come to my reading? I hope it’s at least eight.” By the time I went on tour for I Have Some Questions for You, suddenly it’s not the bookstore. It’s the theater. And it’s full of people who’ve read The Great Believers, which is why they came. They haven’t read the new book yet. And it’s like, “Oh shit.”
SL: In your collection Music for Wartime, you’ve placed among the short stories three small sections of family memories that you’ve titled “Legends.” I can’t help but sense that these family narratives inform something central about your own personal narrative. How do these legends impact you?
RM: I’m never trying to say a specific thing with my work: I’m trying to ask questions. And then I’m trying to use my work to complicate the questions I already have. Or the questions you might already have. In this case those questions are about legacy. There’s the question of how responsible you feel for the actions of your ancestors, your grandparents. Especially in my case, one’s you really didn’t really know. To what extent can you feel proud of them? I’m thinking here about my grandmother, who was an author, who was this amazing person, who I didn’t know because she died when I was a baby. But meanwhile my grandfather, who really didn’t have much part in raising my father, and who I also didn’t really know, did some horrible things as a member of the Hungarian Parliament in the 1930s—and I write about this a lot. Do their actions influence me because of genetics? That doesn’t seem to make sense. Morality is not genetic. If you start talking like that, you start talking like some of the worst people in history. I think the primary way that they would have influenced my life is through narrative, from hearing stories from my parents and other people. With both my grandparents, their lives were a matter of public record. And these received narratives of what they did, who they were, are not necessarily accurate. There are a lot of conflicting, contradictory stories. How do you make sense of those narratives, the ways they have defined you, and the ways you can let them define you? Those are the questions I’m perpetually asking.
SL: I really admire your “84 Books Project,” which has you reading and posting about eighty-four books in translation from all around the world. Can you talk about your project a little bit, maybe speak to the project’s genesis, along with the joys and satisfactions, as well as any frustrations?
RM: The biggest frustration is that I have obligations to judge contests or grade students or blurb books. I’m reading around 120 books a year, but I’m only getting through like three of the translated books. This is ridiculous. I’m trying to re-prioritize my life.
The genesis is two things. One was I just started to realize that because of those career obligations, I was reading almost nothing but contemporary American fiction. Contemporary American fiction has a breadth and depth to it right now unlike any other in our history. Whereas, if you were in 1950 and you were reading only contemporary American fiction, everything would look like John Cheever, right? You can get incredible breadth right now. But still, it’s all from now. And it’s all fiction. I wasn’t reading plays. I wasn’t reading poetry. I wasn’t reading enough nonfiction. I was going, “I need to get out of this claustrophobic little room.”
The other was that my father passed away in January of 2020 from Parkinson’s. He had repatriated to Budapest. My sister and I were going to go in May 2020 for his internment. That did not happen. He was a poet, translator, and a linguistics professor. He spoke about sixteen languages. He was really incredible. He was a very difficult man, but he had an incredible brain. I felt like, “This is going to be my memorial to him. I’m going to read my way around the world. He lived to be eighty-four, so I’m going to read eighty-four books. I’m going to start and end in Hungary.” I’m trying to do countries I have not read the literature from. I’m not going to do Japan. I’m not going to do Italy. And it has to be in translation. I did Southeastern Europe, the Arabian peninsula, and now I’m in Northeastern Africa. I’m reading an Eritrean novella. It’s kind of like Amazing Race-style—hop, hop, hop.
Another frustration is that we don’t get a ton of books translated into English because so much is written in English. Other countries have huge numbers of translated books. I’ve been amazed the couple of times I’ve been in Barcelona for a book stop. There are some amazing writers writing in Catalan, but it’s a limited population. You go into a bookstore and everything in the world has been translated into Catalan. Every writer is also a translator, and they have this amazing literary culture for such a small region. It’s staggering. In the US, something has to win the Nobel Prize, and then maybe we’ll translate it.
I’m trying to read indigenous languages translated into English rather than colonizer languages translated into English. There’s a lot that’s written in French and Italian. Those must be some of my reading because these are some of the authors I want to get to, and it’s just what’s there. It’s been a bit of a scavenger hunt. You find these books put out by tiny presses and someone out there just doing the good work of translating this Sudanese story collection, or this Eritrean novella, for love.
SL: It sounds like a labor of love for you.
RM: Yeah, it is. It’s been amazing to share these things. I do have people reading with me on some of them, especially when I was going more regularly. I’m writing about each of them on my Substack, so often people are picking them up after I’ve written about them. I hear, “I read the Turkish novel you recommended. I loved it.” I discovered some amazing new books that way. And even the ones that maybe aren’t my favorites, I don’t judge them in the way I judge American literature. When I read a contemporary American book, I subconsciously feel I somehow have the standards to judge it. I’m sure I don’t, but...
SL: Well, you’ve read a few books, you’ve written a few books.
RM: Yeah, and I’m also thinking, “How much did you get paid for this, who is your agent, why are you with this press, you were mean to my friend at this conference.”
SL: You’re in the world.
RM: Yeah. I read this Yemeni novella from the forties. I don’t have the standards to judge it, but I loved it. However, if there was something I didn’t like, I’d think, “Maybe it was something about the translation, maybe there’s something I don’t understand about it culturally.” I can just kind of let go of all that. A lot of Arabic literature I found was less scene-based and scene-driven than American fiction. A lot of summary. If I were reading American fiction, I might think, “Why are you doing it this way? It isn’t going to work.” When I read Arabic literature, I think, “Oh, this is the way this is.”
SL: I want to ask you about Alice Munro. As background, Munro’s daughter claims that her stepfather molested her, Munro turned a blind eye toward the issue, and didn’t protect her daughter. This is, of course, just one of a tsunami of cases of artists behaving badly. Can you speak to your relationship with Munro’s work, both then and now, and also explain a bit about the process you came up with in your opinion piece in the L.A. Times?
RM: The first thing I would say is that I wouldn’t use the word “claim.” This has been substantiated on all sides. I always adored her writing on a craft-level especially…I would teach her stories all the time and examine them in this deep, deep way. A lot of my go-to examples for craft issues are her stories. It’s not, for me, just, “Hey, she’s a bad person.” We don’t know the full story, and it sounds like there was probably abuse towards her involved in all of this. I tried to think about what her understanding really was, what support she had. I have no idea. I can say what I think she should have done, but if I were literally judging her, I would want a whole lot more background.
I think that for me, the issue is that in so many of her stories there were women who compromised their integrity in what always read to me as really tragic ways. Usually in terms of a man. Usually in terms of sacrificing who they were or who they’d been. My understanding of those stories was always that the authorial voice above them—which is different than the narrative voice, different than the author, and is the idea of the author-self who wrote these stories—was wiser than these women. Was writing about them with knowing. With irony in some cases, forgiveness in some cases, and judgment in some cases. And always with this very subtle kind of depiction of compromised morality that you can hold as this intentionally flawed object. Certainly we all write from the self. But for me, knowing what I now know about her, I am deeply unconvinced that she understood her own work. We don’t all have to understand everything about our own work—the subconscious comes out in interesting ways. But the thing that I loved most about her work, this sense of authorial knowing, where these characters didn’t know themselves, has been completely lost for me. I think some of her stories now read much less like she was intentionally and wisely holding the character’s consciousness at a certain angle and more like she was saying, this is the way things should be or the way things are—or forgiving herself, either consciously or subconsciously.
I have absolutely no opinion on whether other people should read Munro’s stories. I still recommend some of them to students, but I can’t read them anymore. This really destroys them for me; I would take no enjoyment anymore from reading them.
SL: Will you continue to teach them to your students?
RM: No, because that would involve me reading them. But with a caveat…If it’s really a story that a student needs to read for some craft issue, I might recommend a certain story. I think I’ve done it once since then, said, “Hey, if you want to see this, here’s this story.” I’m not out there saying her books should be burned or her press should not print her anymore. Just, “Here’s how I feel about it, and here’s why.”
SL: In 2020 you were one of the judges of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. In 2023 you participated in PEN America’s World Voices Festival, but in 2024 you pulled out of this event because of their relative lack of support of Palestinian writers—
RM: Not quite. In this case it was specifically about journalists. There was a lot of frustration vocalized from the literary community toward PEN and the foundation because it seemed like there was a lack of support of journalists in Palestine commensurate with support of journalists elsewhere. There are people who disagree and say, “Well, but some journalists in Palestine might also be terrorists.” There are all kinds of different arguments flying from different directions. There was a point where people were pulling out of this festival, and basically everyone really had to make a choice on that, either by staying in or pulling out.
If the whole idea of PEN is specifically not to take sides in political issues that are unrelated to the safety of writers, the safety of journalism, and freedom of the press, then what PEN should do in a situation like this is try to support and protect journalists in every region without saying, “These journalists deserve more protection than these journalists.” You can’t take that and extrapolate a zillion other opinions you might think I have about anything in the world. But if that’s the point of PEN and they weren’t doing it, and people were pulling out to say, “Hey this isn’t okay, this is a protest,” that was an easy decision for me. In fact, there have been positive changes at PEN since then. It seems like it was effective. This year, I am judging the PEN/Nabokov Award.
SL: So you have an ongoing relationship with PEN?
RM: In the sense that most writers do. Many of us are members of PEN America. When I say most of us, I mean if you’re actively publishing books. PEN America is one of the organizations most people have belonged to or will belong to again. They do a ton of stuff, so I have a relationship with them in the same sense that I have an ongoing relationship with the National Book Foundation and the Pulitzer Foundation. I don’t have any special relationship there, no more than other writers do.
SL: I am astounded by your Substack, the sheer volume of writing you put out consistently. On behalf of all the writers who might spend an entire day agonizing over whether a comma should actually be an em dash, I have to ask how you do all this: the Substack, the novels, the teaching, and all the work you do with StoryStudio Chicago, as well as elsewhere in the writing community?
RM: It’s two things. One: I do way too much. I shouldn’t be doing all of this. It’s absolutely a symptom of ADHD to just keep taking stuff on. I look at my inbox and go, “Oh my god, I’m doing five times too much.” I’m constantly trying to figure out what my boundaries are. On the other hand, I will say it looks like I do a lot more than I do in terms of actual hours. If you list all the places I teach, it looks like I teach at all four places at once. I teach at four different places but never more than one at a time. I taught elementary school for twelve years. During that time, I wrote my entire first novel, a lot of my second novel, and basically all of my story collection. By the end of that time, I had a toddler and a baby. I will never ever be that busy again.
SL: It strikes me that your relationship to writing is not at all tortured, that maybe it’s actually fun for you?
RM: Yeah, of course.
SL: Wow, okay. I’m not sure that’s the case for all of us.
RM: It doesn’t seem to be for everyone. And certainly there are times when I’m pulling my hair out but mostly in a fun way. It’s fun frustration, like if you’re trying to solve a puzzle and you can’t. It’s not like root canal-level pain.
SL: I guess I don’t really understand that.
RM: I don’t know. Why would people do it if it’s not fun? If you frame it as, “I hate this, it sucks,” I don’t know what the point is of doing it that way. If you’re bored by your own project, that might be a symptom of something. You need to figure out why that is. What could you do to make this more fun? Maybe it’s not going to be a fun book to read if you’re bored out of your mind, if that’s the issue. If it’s a self-loathing issue, that’s a different thing. I don’t have that issue, at least regarding writing. I certainly beat myself up about things but not in the same way I think some people do. I don’t think that has to do with my strength of character. I think it’s the privilege of having gone to a Montessori school as a kid. We didn’t get any grades until ninth grade. I’m a huge advocate for that kind of schooling, whether public or private. This mode of thinking, that “I’m not good enough,” just isn’t there for me. Or it’s much less for me. I wasn’t raised by hippie parents. My mom was really strict, and my dad was a very difficult person. I was raised very well, but I do think it’s a product of my education. No one in school ever told me, “Jump through these hoops so you get a prize.”
SL: There’s something about achievement, the focus on that, that kind of deadens creativity?
RM: Yes, very much. If you’re constantly focused on what grade you’re going to get then you’re constantly thinking, “Is this good enough?” That’s just not part of my world view, which is very fortunate.
SL: What’s your deal with Zillow?
RM: I love posting my weird finds. I love old houses. I love architecture. I love spying on where people live. Right now, I live in a dorm apartment on a boarding school campus. It’s great, but in about five or six years, we’ll actually buy a real house somewhere near Chicago. It’s daydreaming house-hunting but then you start to find really weird stuff. One of my best searches ever was trying to find the most expensive condo in Indiana. That was in Carmel, and that apartment just screamed, “douche.” He had a picture of Trump above his toilet.
SL: Really? That’s maybe an appropriate place.
RM: Yeah. When I share, it’s only extremely wealthy people. It’s like, “Wow, this person has a bathroom that’s as big as my apartment, and it’s full of marble and sarcophagi. It’s a bathroom, so why would you do this?” I like sharing this on my Substack. It’s just fun. One of my breaks.
SL: Makes you happy?
RM: Very much.