Rebecca Makkai goes back to high school

IF YOUR PRESENT SELF COULD RECKON WITH the past, what would you try to resolve? That's the question that haunts Bodie Kane, the protagonist of I Have Some Questions for You, Rebecca Makkai's slow-burning crime novel, to be published Feb. 21.

- CADY LANG

Bodie, a 40-something film professor, and popular podcaster, has moved on from everything that happened at Granby, the tony New Hampshire boarding school where her roommate Thalia was murdered during their senior year. But when Bodie is invited back to campus to teach a podcasting course, she's forced to revisit long-buried dark truths.

For Makkai, engaging with the past is a daily reality. For the past 21 years, the author, 44, has lived on the campus of the Illinois boarding school that she attended as a day student in the 1990s. Makkai returned to her alma mater after her husband got a job teaching there, expecting to stay just a few years-two decades later, their daughter is a student at the school. With high school memories lurking around every corner, Makkai discovered that spending most of her adult life on her adolescent stomping grounds is an experience that lends itself to spinning a haunting tale.

"Because of where I live, this idea of rewriting the self-the palimpsest of who I was and who I am, while the place stays the same-is often on my mind," says Makkai, speaking from her home office in a girls' dormitory.

In the novel, Thalia's murder has become notorious in true-crime circles, and questions still swirl around whether or not Omar, the school's Black athletic trainer serving a life sentence for the crime, was really responsible. Bodie, now older, wiser, and awakened to the realities of sexual predation and a racist criminal-justice system, has doubts of her own. And, because of a few things she remembers from her time as Thalia's roommate, she also has a strong suspicion about who might really have killed her friend. Disturbed by the realization that she may have played a role in a wrongful conviction, Bodie nudges her students toward investigating the case for the podcast class, setting off events that will find all the key players in the tragedy back in the insular world of Granby for a high-stakes reunion.