The Problem of an Impossible Chapter: A Conversation with Rebecca Makkai

Rebecca Makkai is the Chicago-based author of the novels The Great Believers, The Hundred-Year House, and The Borrower, as well as the short story collection Music for Wartime. The Great Believers was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and received the ALA Carnegie Medal and the LA Times Book Prize, among other honors. Makkai is on the MFA faculties of Sierra Nevada College and Northwestern University, and she is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago.

On October 23rd, 2019, Rebecca Makkai visited Interlochen Arts Academy and sat down with Interlochen Review editors Bianca Layog, Hannah Schoettmer and Tatiana Gross for a conversation about the extensive research that shaped The Great Believers, the surprises and discoveries of the revision process, and the integral connection between art and activism.

Tatiana Gross: Why did you choose to focus your book on communities impacted by AIDS?

Rebecca Makkai: When you start a novel, it often starts somewhere quite different from where it ends up. You're not sitting down going, “I shall write a novel about X,” and then actually writing a novel about X. Funny things happen along the way. Initially, this was a book about the art world of Paris around World War One. This character, who was an artist's model, is looking back on her time, so just mathematically the end of her life would have been in the ‘80s. So I had the ‘80s and I had the art world and I felt that this might be an opportunity to write a little bit about AIDS, maybe as a subplot, and then things changed and changed and evolved and five years later, I ended up with a book that's largely about AIDS. Certainly along the way I realized what it was becoming and I knew that was indeed what I wanted to write. The story of AIDS in Chicago, I was discovering, hasn't been told. When you read books about AIDS, when you watch movies, it's almost always about New York or San Francisco. So it was rewarding to do that research and to tell a story that I knew needed to be told.

Hannah Schoettmer: So you mentioned that when you think about the AIDS epidemic in America during the 80s, you generally think of San Francisco or New York. Why did you decide to set your book in Chicago specifically?

RM:  I live there. Before I really knew what the book was going to be, I decided I wanted this art guy—my main character––to be leaving the city and traveling somewhere kind of beautiful and remote to meet with this woman who was a potential donor, who was the artist model. I had recently spent some time in Door County, Wisconsin and felt like that was perfect. Chicago and Door County were both places that I could write about with some authority. I realized that I was writing across differences in so many ways, which was really terrifying. I'm not a gay man. I was a kid in the ‘80s. So keeping it about Chicago, which is a city I know really well, could keep both me and the story grounded. 

TG: As a follow-up question, what was that research process like?

RM: Early on it was a lot of googling and seeing what I could find. I found a few interesting things that way. I was hoping that I could watch a documentary about AIDS in Chicago and I wasn't finding much online. So I ended up at the library downtown to see what was available, even if they were really boring books about city planning or whatever. Chicago is America's third largest city and there were zero books on the AIDS crisis there. There’s just some sections in longer books like Out and Proud in Chicago. I have a coffee table book and there's a few pages on it in there that are wonderful, but in terms of actual books about AIDS in Chicago, I couldn't find those. They did have back issues of gay weekly newspapers, that I was able to read every issue of from ‘85 to ‘92. Most of my research was interviews. I reached out to friends, had people introduce me to other people and I ended up talking to doctors, nurses, lawyers, journalists, activists, historians. Just absolutely everyone. 

Bianca Layog: What kind of research did you have to do to adequately contextualize your novel given the setting and art, since it seems to revolve around the art world?

RM: Yeah, that's another thing. The research on AIDS in Chicago was one branch of research. Then there's also research into the way that people make donations to museums or even to university development offices. I do have a lot of friends who are visual artists, so I felt like I didn't need to do too much research on how the life of a contemporary artist would work. I do have this character Richard who's an artist now, but I needed to do research on the Paris art world of the teens and ‘20s, and in contrast that was really easy to find information on. There’s infinite biographies of artists' lives in Paris. At that time, books about what happened to these artists in World War I and all that stuff was there, so that was easier. But for that reason, it was actually less compelling for me because it was kind of too easy—I was able to find it right away and I was more drawn to the stuff that was harder to find.

TG: You mentioned in a 2015 interview with the Michigan Quarterly Review that you studied piano and voice in college and that you were raised around musicians. In your short story collection, you write more about a musical focus rather than visual art. There seems to be more of a focus on visual art in The Great Believers. Did you use other media for inspiration or reference when writing the novel? 

RM: Yeah. I mean you're constantly surrounding yourself with the music and pictures and things that will get you in the zone of the book.  I certainly was finding photographs really evocative when I could find photos of anything going on in Chicago among the gay community or the AIDS activist community in the 80s, but I also had photos from elsewhere. I found this one beautiful photograph of five guys in Chicago at this outdoor candlelight vigil. And the one survivor from that photo was someone I actually ended up interviewing. These men [are] still sitting there with candles, their faces lit from below, and it's just really beautiful, and I made it the wallpaper on my laptop so that every time I opened my computer it was there. It's actually still my wallpaper—I haven't been able to bring myself to change it yet. There's also music that was particularly helpful or meaningful as I wrote. It was a song referenced in the book. The very first one is Simon and Garfunkel's live version of “America” from their Central Park concert and it was something that I just I would go on YouTube and watch over and over and over again.It just felt like the thing that was getting me into the mental zone for the book, into the place where I had last been emotionally when I worked on it. It's funny because it's not a book about this topic at all—it just just did something for me to tune myself into the writing.

BL: In an interview with BOMB magazine in 2015, you say that Music for Wartime asks a question that's right there in the title. What does it mean to be an artist to try to make beauty in a brutal world? Do you feel like that's a theme you bring into most of your work. If so, why do you choose to focus on this theme?

RM: I think it's less about me choosing this as a theme than recognizing it as a theme of my writing. Many of my stories seem to be about this, and as I put that collection together, [I was] looking for thematic links between the stories. The stories that didn't fit that would get tossed and I would write more stories that did have to do with art or music in the midst of chaos, and ultimately that's it—it was not a conscious thought at all. It happened that this novel is quite similar in its themes.  There is actually a short story in Music for Wartime about AIDS in the New York art world in the ‘80s.

BL: Did you write the 1985 sections first or the 2015 sections first?

RM: I started the book setting it only in the ‘80s. I wrote about seventy to one hundred pages in and then I realized I really needed to bring it into what was then the modern-day. 2015 feels like ancient history now, but that was when I was writing [the novel] and I knew that I needed another point of view character, and I knew I really wanted to be writing about aftermath and long-term survivor's guilt and about where things stand today. And so I went back and I wrote the 2015 chapters to go between the pieces I already had until I was caught up, and from that point on, I was really going back and forth between them and trying to break them in sequence until the end. There was a lot of shuffling and restructuring and editing, and a lot of hair pulling at a certain point too.

HS: So a lot of the book revolves around the experiences of the protagonist, Yale. Could you tell us a little bit about your process of crafting his character, especially given the deep knowledge and research required to make both his occupation and his experience really believable? 

RM: It was important to me that I had my character and my basic plot before I sat down and interviewed people so that I could reassure them in good faith that I was not going to use their stories or their friends' stories. I just wanted details so that I wasn't limited by or unduly influenced by what really happened to someone, and this could really be my creation. So I really had most of him and most of all of these characters pretty early on. This makes me sound cold and calculating, but you kind of have to be cold and calculating when you are building a plot, when you know what the crisis is that someone's going to go through. I feel very weird, especially in this context talking about that because it feels like I'm victimizing someone even though he's a figment of my own imagination. It gets really fraught. But  I wanted someone who was going to be capable of great change. 

You're ultimately looking for the ways a character can change over the course of a story or novel. If I put in someone who was more jaded to begin with, I don't think that would have worked. If I put in someone who was already an activist at the beginning, he wouldn't have a lot of places to go. I was thinking of the traditional structure of classical tragedy. I don't want to create a story where someone brings it upon himself. That would not be accurate. That's not fair. That's the way that this brutal disease works, but I needed to give him a flaw that made him more susceptible to hurt, from his friends, his lovers, the world. He's a little bit naive in a lot of ways and a little bit unsure of himself, and that gave him a lot of places to go throughout the book. He was able to become stronger, even as his life was falling apart. He was able to become an activist by the end of the book to some extent, and that arc was important for me. Where is he at the beginning of this all? 

TG: That brings me to this question–something that's really interesting is the bond between two of your broken protagonists, Fiona and Yale, but you find a way to keep connections going on among them, as well as Nico and Nora, Fiona's relatives. Which characters came to you first and which connection did you know would be central? How did you come to these stories about Yale and Fiona? 

RM: I originally put Fiona on the page because the novel starts with this very populated memorial party.  I was trying to introduce some characters but not too many because that's going to be overloaded and it's all these men and I was like, well, there's got to be at least one woman at this party. So I made this female character Fiona. Originally, I had her in there just as someone whose brother had already died, but this wasn't his memorial, and she was part of the group of friends. I didn't have it in there that she was connected to Nora in any way, to the artist's model. She was just a random extra, but I thought she was kind of fun. She was drunk at the memorial service and then I brought her back for another. They're having a fundraiser and I had the scene where Yale’s crying on her outside the party about this thing about her how her earrings were always so big and her brother always used to say they get caught on trees, and I just started to find her really interesting. 

So she was still just a minor character, but when I realized that I needed another point of view and I needed a modern day story, I was kind of going through who I already had in the book to figure out if there's someone here who I could pull out and do something with, and she was the one I was most excited to write about. It’s partly that she's so young in the ‘80s and then she's a mother of an adult child. She's a grandmother by 2015, and the long arm of grief in her life and what it's done to her were compelling to me. Other characters like Julian just kind of showed up. Everett and others I had to work harder on and think about their role in the book and what I needed from them. Julian arrived fully formed—the way he approaches people at parties and just kind of flops on them.

HS: Throughout the novel I noticed that you use a lot of more poetic language in moments of inner turmoil. How would you approach incorporating this and what did you have in mind looking at your novel on the language level?

RM: I don't think it's just I don't think actively consciously about language when I write. I'm not going to search for the perfect metaphor. It's more like I'm allergic to things that don't sound good, and I really am paying attention to sound, especially as I revise. It's really a very instinctual musical kind of thing for me—I'm not sitting there going, ‘I shall now be poetic.’ It just happens. 

The one place that I could point to as a much more poetic, much less prosy part of the book would be a chapter in the book where someone receives a diagnosis that's written completely differently from the rest of the book intentionally. I needed it to just kind of float there and be utterly different than everything else around it, and I ended up writing something that in my mind felt more like writing poetry, with lots of line breaks and separate little paragraphs, a lot more imagery, a lot less action. The solution to the problem of an impossible chapter to write for me was to approach it that way.  

TG: You've started The Great Believers donate hashtag and have a list of organizations and resource centers on your website as well as mention organizations such as Open Hand at the end of your book. Can you tell us about your future plans to continue on with this mission to give back? 

RM: Yeah. Absolutely. Because I'm writing across differences, also because I'm writing about trauma, and because this is a really important issue for the world, it seemed obvious that I needed to do fundraising around the book as soon as it came out. The hashtag was basically just in the first couple of months, when the book was out in hardcover. If people instagrammed it with the hashtag, then I was donating a dollar, but I had seven or eight bookstores all matching my donation to  a very small grassroots organization in Chicago that's been around since the ‘80s. 

A lot of the events that I do are fundraisers for LGBTQ health centers, or are in conversation with someone in a certain city, who knows that city's history of AIDS. So it's this really educational bent, if not fundraising, but I'm always happy when we can actually actively raise money to donate. These organizations are trying to make safe places for LGBTQ people, young and adult, and are trying to educate people about the ongoing risk of HIV. New infections are on the rise, largely because of a lot of misinformation and people believing that this has been cured and it's not a problem anymore, so this is incredibly vital work. It's funny, because I think most books that you write, you kind of leave behind when you stop publicizing them, but with The Great Believers, I think this is something I'm going to be involved in this world for the rest of my life, partly because of friends that I've made with some of the people I interviewed, and partly because it's a book people think of as they're putting together a fundraiser or event, which makes me really happy. I think I just got sort of radicalized by the people. This is my cause now— it kind of always was, but not in this active way. It was always something I cared about. 

HS: You mention that Lori Cannon, the cofounder of Open Hand, member of the AIDS Legal Council of Chicago, and IMPACT member, was a major and invaluable resource for you while writing The Great Believers. How did you find and connect with people who help these communities? 

RM: When I realized I needed to do these one on one interviews, I first started by just reaching out on Facebook. Just posting on my own wall page: I'm looking for people who were out in Chicago in the ‘80s or connected to the HIV/AIDS world in the ‘80s. I'm not trying to base a story on you. I just need texture and detail. I'll buy you lunch. I have an enormous number of gay friends, but they tend to be more my age and were not out and in the city when this was happening. 

People started tagging friends though, and the first few people that I met with were kind of removed, like someone who'd moved to the city in 1993 and then worked for ACT UP, which wasn't quite the epicenter of what I was looking for. But at the end of every interview, I would ask, “Who are the next three people you think I should talk to?” And then they were not only recommending people but introducing me over email. Certainly not everyone wanted to talk; there were plenty of people who wanted nothing to do with it. I totally get it. But an amazing number were open to it, and would often meet me in their homes despite never having met me before because they didn't want to talk about this in a Starbucks. Within minutes of my meeting them, they're talking about this incredibly traumatic time in their lives and or about activism and there was wonderful joy often in what they were telling me–remembering this really incredibly vibrant time with friends who were beloved, who they really miss. At a certain point, I found myself talking to people in this inner circle of its LGBTQ history and AIDS activism in Chicago. And Lori Cannon is one of those people. She's the one who started a food and grocery delivery service, a food pantry, that’s been going strong since the ‘80s.

TG: Would you tell us anything about your future projects or your next plans? 

RM: I'll say this, especially since we're here at a boarding school. I've lived on campus at the boarding school where my husband teaches for eighteen years, and I'm finally writing a boarding school novel. It's from an adult point of view looking back. It's actually going to be kind of dark and disturbing.