I Have Some Questions for You

In 1995, a girl was murdered on the grounds of her elite private boarding school in New Hampshire, and Bodie Kane suspects the wrong man went to prison. Bodie is the host of a successful podcast about the lives of Hollywood starlets, both adored and wrongfully maligned. When she is invited back to her alma mater to teach, her fixation on the murder of her roommate Thalia Keith grows. She assigns her new students with a simple task: produce a three-episode podcast on a significant moment in the school’s history. In doing so, she has planted the seed and piqued the interest of true-crime critical student Britt, who takes on Thalia’s murder. Bodie is heedful that she might be using Britt as a vehicle through which she can reopen the closed case. One that is free from the scrutiny of both her proximity to the murder, and her growing public image. But Bodie is withholding secrets about what she saw, what she knew, and what she has come to realise about Thalia’s murder.

Pulitzer Prize finalist Rebecca Makkai’s latest novel is a timely investigation into the second lives of tragic events. What happens when someone’s murder is taken into fiction, to be pulled apart and prodded at by curious strangers? Just as time has distorted Bodie’s memory of Thalia’s murder, it has changed the lens through which she understands the structures it occurred within. Here she undergoes the maddening experience of awareness that has arrived too late. Distrusting her own version of events, Bodie becomes preoccupied with how it looks to others. I Have Some Questions for You asks us to consider our fascination with true crime, as much as it feeds it. Makkai’s high school campus novel is most remarkable in its ability to toe this line.