“I have Some Questions For You” Review
By Bryce Thompson, 2024
As an MFA student, it can be hard to fit in the time for personal, pleasurable reading during the semester, so every book I read outside of class feels like an investment of resources. My time is limited, so it’s easy for me to default to readings I’m more comfortable with: science fiction, fantasy, humor, satire, etc. It's not so much that I’m incapable of enjoying other genres as much as I know which books I’d prefer to read during my office hours. For starters, I don’t like true crime. I acknowledge it as a guilty pleasure indulgence for a lot of people, but I don’t like how the genre both disturbs and bores me with exploitative murder porn. I also don’t like teen dramas. I don’t need a book for teen drama—I have my memories for that.
Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions For You, however, is about true crime and teen drama, and I thought it was brilliant.
Bait and switch introduction aside, it’s not like the book is in need of one of lowly MFA student’s praise, anyways. Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions For You has become a New York Time’s best seller and has naturally been received well by critics and audiences alike. The reason I feel compelled to talk about this book, though, is because of how the craft made me enjoy the book’s subject matter more than I ever expected to.
The book’s point of view, for instance, does a lot of work in informing how the story’s content is represented. The story’s protagonist, Bodie Kane, also serves as our narrator as she recounts a visit to her old boarding school. What starts as a class on podcasting gradually changes to a reinvestigation of the death of one of Bodie’s former classmates. Along the way, Bodie has to come to terms with how she and her fellow classmates may have neglected the various warning signs, in more ways than one, that fed into the toxic underbelly of the school that also provided a safe haven for the students that attended. In that sense, there’s a lot of humanity given to characters that are initially described very negatively while also providing darker sides to other characters we’re initially sympathetic to. Almost everyone in the book is, to an extent, meant to be criticized, but we can still sympathize with them.
And speaking of the darker sides of characters, that’s where the point of view really comes into play. Without giving away too many spoilers, the point of view is also technically in second person. Throughout the book, Bodie directly interrogates someone from her past, asking them about their destructive decisions and demanding answers for their behavior. Because of this framing device, the entire book literally serves as an interrogation of its characters, making it highly reflective.
Where I think I Have Some Questions For You succeeds the most is that it isn’t a true crime story or a teen drama as much as it’s about true crime and teen dramas. Our narrator isn’t actively participating in dirty gossip with her classmates, nor is she hitching herself to a bandwagon of armchair critics and internet sleuths. Rather, she’s either looking back at events years after the fact or from afar on social media. The distance allows her to be more reflective than had she been caught up in the action in real time.
In short, there’s plenty of twists and turns in this literary whodunit that carry broad social implications. Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions For You gives readers an intelligent narrator to guide them through the disorienting maze of predatory relationships, cancel culture, and media’s obsession with real world trauma.
