![]() ![]() A good boarding school, just like a small liberal arts college, is doing a tremendous job with scholarships and getting kids ready for really rigorous colleges and kids who might not otherwise have had that experience at their local high school, depending on where they’re from, either internationally or nationally.Īnd of course the thing about any school narrative is it’s really, really rare to read anything from the teacher point of view or the adult point of view. People are imagining what they think boarding schools were like in the 1950s instead of what’s going on now. It’s also the way people get things wrong. There’s partly the romanticization of it, like it’s always October, the leaves are always changing, everyone’s wearing beautiful sweaters. I’m also really always frustrated with the ways that boarding schools are misrepresented in novels and movies and TV. Like I said, I think it’s a really fascinating kind of community. Why were you drawn to writing a boarding school novel? Can you speak more to that? And once you get enough things all stuck together, it starts to snowball and that becomes the next novel you’re going to write. So just the idea of people needing to reconvene for a trial for something that happened a long time ago - that’s something that started to capture my imagination and started to stick to this idea of a boarding school novel. And things start to stick to those ideas. I ended up making it so different from this school that hopefully nobody would possibly think it was.īut I always have ideas in the back of my head, several competing novel ideas at any time. And I always joke that I wasn’t going to write it till I was on my deathbed, so that nobody would think it was about them. I live on the campus of the boarding school where my husband teaches, and it’s just a fascinating kind of community. It’s not one thing and I suddenly went, ‘Wait, I have an idea for a novel.’īut I will say that I was always going to write a boarding school novel. ![]() And then my problem is always that there are so many seeds. Rebecca Makkai: I always love that question, and it’s always the one I want authors to answer. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.ī: Where did the seed for this story come from? How did you start thinking about it? In the new book, Makkai, whose 2018 novel “The Great Believers” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, focuses her lens on a range of subjects, including the obsession with true crime, the fixation within that genre on white female victims, the spectrum of violence and harassment against women, and systemic racism, particularly within the criminal justice system.īelow, Makkai shares what she hopes readers will think about after picking up the novel, what was challenging about working on the book, and why she was drawn to writing a boarding school novel. As she delves into her own memories, scrutinizing the events surrounding her classmate’s death, she also begins questioning and reflecting on her own experiences on the campus and the image she had of herself as a student. ![]()
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