Political Gabfest - Gabfest Reads: A Boarding School Thriller, But Make It Feminist
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3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 18 February 2023
⏱️ 33 minutes
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Summary
Emily Bazelon talks with author Rebecca Makkai about her new book, I Have Some Questions For You. They discuss why it’s so easy to suspend disbelief with this type of story, the “cancelled” subplot, and whether we’d be better off without Twitter.
Tweet us your questions @SlateGabfest or email us at gabfest@slate.com. (Messages could be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)
Podcast production by Cheyna Roth.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to GabFest Reeds for the month of February. I'm Emily Bazelon, one of the hosts of Slate's Political GabFest. |
| 0:14.6 | I am really excited to be here today with a wonderful novelist, Rebecca McKay. Hi, Rebecca. Hi. So glad that you were |
| 0:24.8 | joining us for this book, which I think is going to be a big splash, and I had such a good time |
| 0:30.7 | reading. So your book, your new book, is called I Have Some Questions for You. And we are going to |
| 0:36.3 | talk about that in just a minute. I want to |
| 0:38.9 | briefly mention that you have written several previous novels, including The Great Believers, |
| 0:44.7 | which is just a wonderful book. And everybody should go read that book alongside. I have some |
| 0:50.9 | questions for you. It's really just such a treasured a read of mine on my bookshelf. |
| 0:57.7 | And you're also the artistic director of Story Studio Chicago, which is a very cool-sounding writer training sort of project, right? |
| 1:06.0 | Yeah, it is very cool. It's writers of all levels of experience and all ages. And now we're online, too, |
| 1:12.4 | thanks to the pandemic, but it was the silver lining. So yeah, it's a, it's a great job. |
| 1:17.4 | So I have some questions for you. Rebecca's new novel has some real heat to it. She describes |
| 1:24.0 | it as a literary feminist boarding school murder mystery, which I loved. |
| 1:29.3 | The protagonist of the novel is Bodey Kane. She is a lonely girl for much of the story from |
| 1:36.5 | Southern Indiana. And some of the book revolves around her experience as a charity case at a made-up |
| 1:43.3 | boarding school in New Hampshire called |
| 1:45.4 | Granby. When Bodie is a junior in high school, her roommate Thalia Keith is murdered. |
| 1:52.9 | And it's a really horrible crime that takes place on campus. And the school trainer, |
| 1:59.8 | who is a young, pretty young black guy, winds up being accused of this crime and convicted and is in prison. |
| 2:06.7 | Most of the novel unfolds years later, maybe about 20 years later, when Bodie is an adult who has gone off into the world and become a successful podcaster. And her podcast is |
| 2:19.4 | about Hollywood, and a lot of it is actually about women who've had kind of mysterious things |
| 2:25.3 | go wrong for them in their lives in the past, real people. She comes back to Granby to the |
... |
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