I wrote a thing and somebody published it!

Plus some thoughts on Rebecca Makkai for paid subscribers

Hello and happy Friday, friends! I’m excited to share my latest publication with you, a short piece of nonfiction called Bullseye about boobs and death. There’s also a male stripper in it. (Maybe this why I don’t get invited to your parties anymore?) Thanks, as always, for reading 💜

Bullseye, by Julia F. Green

Also a big thanks to all of you who weighed on the new art for my podcast, Writing in the Dark. We have a winner and it’s pretty great and I’m super excited to share it with you very soon! In the meantime, check out Episode 1.

One more thing: if you need some good art in your life, please go see American Fiction, a movie that is very funny, deeply moving, and phenomenally acted (NYT critic’s pick!).

For my neighbors in North Carolina, I urge you to go see UNC’s production of Fat Ham before it closes February 18. If you don’t live here, I’m sure you can still see it—the play won the Pulitzer in 2022 and is being produced all over the country. It’s also very funny, deeply moving, and phenomenally acted. Yeah, I have a type.

Now, let’s get into some deep thoughts on reading. I just devoured Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions for You, which deserves some unpacking.

The beginning of this book is masterful. It starts with a very brief prologue of sorts that lists news stories about murdered women in a way that gut punches the reader by cleverly demonstrating—in a very small space—the epidemic of violence against women and how we as a society have become inured to it.

“Wasn’t it the one where she was stabbed in—no. The one where she got in a cab with—different girl. The one where she went to the frat party, the one where he used a stick, the one where he used a hammer, the one where she picked him up from rehab and he—no. The one where he’d been watching her jog every day? The one where she made the mistake of telling him her period was late? The one with the uncle? Wait, the other one with the uncle?”

She then narrows it to the particular story this book will investigate—the murder of a classmate at boarding school, who was “young enough and white enough and pretty enough and rich enough that people paid attention”—and closes the prologue with “maybe it was the one we got wrong.” Out of the gate, Makkai puts a lot on the table: There was a murder, which was solved but perhaps incorrectly, of a young woman who is but one of many. I felt quite a foreboding thud reading this quick and brutal introduction to the story.

I also want to highlight the opening pages of the main narrative, which introduce so many questions. Here are the first two sentences:

“I first watched the video in 2016. I was in bed on my laptop, with headphones, worried Jerome would wake up and I’d have to explain. Down the hall my children slept.”

The scene already feels set with subterfuge—not waking Jerome, presumably the spouse, or the children down the hall. Our narrator is an adult, with a family, and yet up late on her laptop instead of going to sleep.

The second paragraph, in its entirety:

“But a friend I hadn’t seen in twenty years had just sent me the link, and so I clicked.”

That’s a sentence that introduces a lot more questions and tension.

Most of the rest of the chapter recounts the video, which is a detailed description of a high school theater production that occurred ~25 years earlier (which the narrator did tech). There is footage of Thalia Keith, the young woman who is murdered later that night, and below it are comments exploring the events, people and timeline of that night, questioning the resolution of the case, arguing they caught the wrong guy and in fact this murder is still unsolved.

If that isn’t enough tension for you, the chapter ends with this line:

“And you, Mr. Bloch: I suppose it’s been convenient for you, too.”

At this point, I’m 7 pages in and the questions are swirling: who is this young woman who was murdered, and what went wrong in her case? Who is the narrator—how does she feel about watching this video, about Thalia, about whatever happened decades ago? Did she play some part in it? What is she hiding from Jerome? And Mr. Bloch— who is Mr. Bloch, and why is the narrator speaking directly to him???

Makkai masterfully layers a lot of elements into this beginning, signaling to the reader that this is going to be a lot more than a murder mystery.

I want to be clear that a beginning like this takes effort and time. I often tell students that the beginning is the last element of a book that gets finalized because it sets the stage for all that’s to come—it names the themes and main players and preoccupations. Which you can’t do until you’re really clear on what those are, which usually takes roughly 37,000 drafts. I’d wager that Makkai wrote for a while before Mr. Bloch appeared, before she decided to make the narrator address him directly throughout the book.

As for the rest of the book, it’s long but an absolute page turner. I particularly admire the level of detail Makkai gives. Every scene is incredibly rich and real. Perhaps I’m more sensitive to this because I’m in the early stage of what I’m writing, when I don’t bother with any of that. In early revision, I’m focused entirely on getting the characters, their arcs, and relationships to line up. The window dressing comes much later on.

I also want to shout out a deeply flawed narrator. She’s not deeply unlikable, but she’s also not great, and she knows that and tells us that, which I find a really winning way to connect with the reader. All the characters in this book are fairly complex, and the B story unfolds the narrator’s self-destructive tendencies cleverly, creating another narrative arc that was as interesting to me as the question of who murdered Thalia.

I was curious to see how Makkai stuck the landing on this one. Necessarily a book set up as a whodunit is going to have a final answer to that question, and most of us enjoy the puzzle, trying to guess who the murderer is and the answers to other related questions. Some of my suspicions were confirmed, and I was wrong about a few things, which I’m OK with. If I know how a book is going to end, I have no interest in reading it. I knew this ending was going to have some twists and not resolve neatly and I think Makkai did a great job with that.

I’ve heard mixed reviews of this book, which I get. I will argue that our most talented writers are held to the highest standards, and some might say this book was a little fluffier than what Makkai has written in the past. Her previous novel, The Great Believers, was an incredible book—serious, well-researched, deeply emotional. I don’t think Questions isn’t emotional, but those who loved the Great Believers and were hungry for something similar definitely will not get that in this book. Still, I think it explores some compelling questions about our culture’s fascination with true crime as well as misogyny and racism. And it’s a damn good read.