69 pages • 2 hours read
Rebecca MakkaiI Have Some Questions for You
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Role of Memory in the Search for Truth
Content Warning: This section of the guide features depictions of suicide, self-harm, disordered eating, and sexual assault.
The search for truth in I Have Some Questions for You organizes much of the novel’s narration, as the title suggests. Bodie, the narrator, has questions for everyone, from the students she knew at Granby to the deceased abusers in Hollywood whose wrongdoings she examines on Starlet Fever. Accordingly, her narration and her internal musings throughout the novel take the form of questions, accusations, and explanations aimed at the imaginary presence of her Granby music teacher, Mr. Dennis Bloch. Evocative of a podcast, the questions will never be answered by Bloch; instead, Bodie takes an active role in seeking those answers for herself, accessing her memories and ferreting out evidence from the trial as she attempts to solve the murder of Thalia Keith.
Early in the novel, Bodie connects her search for truth and what really happened after their performance of Camelot to her professional podcast. Imagining what motivated Omar to kill Thalia, Bodie says, “I turned it over, lap after lap, the cold water settling deep in my joints. The story I knew felt a lot like the stories Lance and I examined on our podcast, the ones passed down through decades of misinformation and bias” (81). Using a metaphor for swimming, she figuratively places herself in the coldness of the water that Thalia experienced that night. Truth, Bodie explains, becomes part of her, as the cold water and cold truth take over her joints and body. Truth and memory become linked in this discussion, as decades of misinformation and bias recast and distort the stories of both Thalia and of the many Hollywood starlets who have suffered abuse over the years. Imagining truth being as deeply buried as her memories of childhood and Granby, she claims that “the truth was in there, but you had to dig” (81).
As she asks questions and begins to dig, the truths she finds shift deceptively. Ultimately, her investigations reveal that while Robbie killed Thalia, Bloch is guilty of blatant sexual harassment, and the corrupt institution of Granby shields both predators from having to answer for their respective crimes. This ever-changing truth appears in the novel in the structuring of chapters. Between normally ordered chapters, Bodie places interludes where she imagines scenarios of different people killing Thalia. Yet through all the permutations, Thalia dies in each scenario, and that grim reality remains the ultimate truth. Far from being a whimsical affectation, these scenarios serve to demonstrate just how many people had a role in Thalia’s death, whether directly or indirectly. As Bodie remembers more of the abuse at Granby and how faculty and administrators accept it, even going so far as to chuckle at sexual harassment scrawled on chalkboards, Bodie recognizes the truth behind Thalia’s murder: that Robbie, Mike, Bloch, and Dr. Calahan, among others, constitute cogs in a corrupt machine that destroys innocent people and protects the privileged and powerful.
The #MeToo Movement and Pervasive Sexual Harassment
Even as the novel grapples with truth and its search, the effect of the #MeToo Movement and the explosion of allegations in the 21st century loom large in the novel’s descriptions of Thalia’s murder and Bodie’s estranged marriage. While Bodie teaches at Granby, Jerome faces allegations of grooming and predatory behavior, and many other women join his younger ex-girlfriend online to amplify her claims.
The #MeToo Movement has been a positive force, uncovering inappropriate, predatory behavior and creating community among survivors. But as Bodie soon learns, #MeToo accusations prove nearly impossible to fight and disprove, at least in the novel. Her efforts to defend her husband fail, as her own self-interest in this particular instance pushes her to disavow the account of harassment that puts her husband and her quality of life at risk. Thus, she betrays her own axiom to “believe women,” and Beth criticizes Bodie’s hypocrisy by declaring, “You don’t believe that woman, but you believe women when it suits you” (372). While both Bodie and Beth should share a sense of connection for having been tormented by the same abuser at Granby, solidarity eludes them in the face of these present-day divisions.
According to both Beth and Bodie, the #MeToo Movement requires a reappraisal of truth, as Beth learns when her 12-year-old daughter defends rumors, arguing that “rumors are how we know if someone’s an abuser” (372). Conflicted as well in a post-#MeToo world, Bodie admits that she “hated how part of me—still!—held on to the notion that Thalia was, with full volition, choosing to sleep with [Bloch] because [he was] young and everyone thought [he was] cute” (212). While she’s comfortable separating Bloch’s blurring of boundaries from her own husband’s actions, Wilde’s accusations echo those against Bloch in uncomfortable ways.
The Corruption Within Academic Power Structures
Granby symbolizes the persistent protection afforded to predators who hide behind their public status within academic institutions and other elite power structures. Bodie explores this decay at the center of academic hierarchy through the murder of Thalia, but soon sees how connected it is to Hollywood and the subjects of Starlet Fever. At a faculty party at Granby, the attendees discuss one unnamed case of gender-based violence after another, until one guest implicates Hollywood and money, stating, the “thing about Hollywood […] is that they’ll cover up anything in the name of money” (188). Without a hint of irony, the speaker accuses Hollywood and its institutions of committing the same type of cover-up that Granby accomplishes after Thalia dies.
In the hearing for a new trial, evidence of Granby’s complicity in the cover-up becomes obvious when Dr. Calahan’s instructions to the investigators are made public. According to the lead investigator, Dr. Calahan suggested that the authorities “look at community members strong enough to heft a struggling body into the pool. Not students, not faculty” (363). Whether or not he is aware of Robbie’s or Bloch’s involvement, Calahan’s actions seek closure and a conviction rather than justice and the truth. In trying to draw an implicit distinction between Hollywood and Granby, the speaker at the party unintentionally highlights the dissonance between academia’s polished, idealized vision of itself and the sordid reality of its unethical application of power to influence the world for its own interests. Bloch will be moved to school after school before he faces any punishment, and Priscilla Mancio will continue to worry more about the press than the truth.
This corruption, however, doesn’t remain sequestered at Granby. Instead, it infects those ensconced in Granby’s privilege, protecting both Robbie and Bloch, as well as creating hypocrites out of alums. Mike, ostensibly an example of the archetypal “good guy,” presents “an interesting case study: someone with a career’s worth of experience in human rights, who still couldn’t quite handle justice if it would affect his buddy” (318). His personal investment in his friend’s clean public image can excuse murder and keep an innocent man behind bars, while he continues to write about truth, justice, and human rights in an abstract way.
Omar notes the pervasiveness of this decay, particularly in the ways that Granby guards its own members and its institutional privileges in the world. After Britt asks whether Omar blames Granby, he admits:
I don’t think they set out to use me. But I think Granby leaned hard on the police to solve this, and they leaned hard on them not to look too close at the teachers and students. That school has lawyers you wouldn’t believe. They’ve got money you wouldn’t believe (313).
Omar sees a reality to which the attendees at the faculty part remain blind. As an outsider, Omar is very conscious of the power Granby wields to maintain its position, spending money on expensive lawyers to solve problems and command silence. Rather than risk negative attention, Granby pressures the police for an easy arrest and “someone like” Omar. Bodie explains this quick investigation, pinning some of the blame on the alumni, who “were descending” and putting Dr. Calahan in a “world of pressure to get all yellow tape and swarming investigators off campus, to get the garbage bags off the windows, lest the volleyball games look like they were happening in a fallout shelter” (184). The deterioration of these academic structures spreads, as institutions protect abusers and produce alumni who require silence, complicity, and the maintenance of tradition. Tradition itself thus becomes synonymous with rot and decay.
