Rebecca Makkai is a liar. At least, she used to be—“I had my whole class convinced when I was five that there was a school ghost. And I started a newsletter about the ghost, and I would plant evidence of the ghost everywhere,” she said in an interview with The Miscellany News. “Other people started seeing the ghost, which I was very proud of.”
There was nothing sinister or manipulative behind her lying, Makkai clarified; she just liked to entertain. She has since built a career out of it. Along with a slew of short stories, four of which have been anthologized in “The Best American Short Stories,” Makkai has penned four novels. Her best-known work, “The Great Believers,” about the AIDS epidemic in Chicago, was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize and received the ALA Carnegie Medal and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Makkai has a clear, hydrated-sounding voice. She cuffs her pants. She is Vassar’s 2025 Writer-in-Residence.
Makkai arrived on campus last week, and on Feb. 3, delivered a reading in Rockefeller Hall 300 to a crowd of students, professors and Poughkeepsie community members alike. She first recited her piece “A Story for Your Daughters, a Story for Your Sons,” wanting to open with a “complete work” before jumping into a sample of her 2023 novel, “I Have Some Questions for You.” The chalkboard behind her was covered with differential calculus.
Besides certain ubiquitously funny snippets, reactions to Makkai’s work were highly individualized, with audience members humming, nodding and frowning at different moments. Teasing out emotions is somewhat of a trademark for Makkai—she often chooses to tackle sensitive, timely themes in her writing. “I Have Some Questions for You,” for example, explores true crime podcasting, boarding school and sexual harassment in the form of a mystery-thriller. But perhaps the most moving element of the book is the way Makkai uses technology to ground her readers in the contemporary; the first chapter begins with a social media comments section.
“[Undergraduates] are all setting their stories in the ’80s and ’90s so that they can avoid cell phones,” Makkai told The Miscellany News. “I think people, for some reason, are taught this idea that you shouldn’t anchor [your work] to a specific moment in time. But nothing’s timeless, right?”
Inquiries about research methods and sources of inspiration dominated the Q&A session that followed Makkai’s reading. Removing and repositioning her glasses several times, she joked that her final draft is always the opposite of her intended draft: “If I try to write anything light and funny, it goes really, really dark. And if I try to write something really dark, I can’t help myself and I insert humor into it.” “The Great Believers” originally started out as a juicy romance set in the Parisian art world during the 1910s. “It’s always been very helpful to me to let things shift around as I change, as the world changes and as the story changes,” Makkai said.
However, the extent to which real life influences Makkai’s writing extends only so far. She insists her characters are all entirely fictional. “I did base a dog on a real dog once, because I didn’t really need the dog to think,” she said, adding that this particularly horrible poodle was stolen from the mom of her high school boyfriend. “But taking someone I know as a character has serious limitations. I’ve never been tempted to.”
Seated in the library of the Alumnae House, where everything—the couch, the rug, the curtains, the chairs—is covered in some kind of swirly pattern, Makkai was at once relaxed and focused. Her left hand, adorned with a sparkly watch and a scrunchie, remained grounded in her lap, while she gestured gracefully with her right. Flipping through an oversized book of Miscellany News archives, she reflected on her days as a humor columnist for her college paper. It was good editing practice, she said, for she always had to trim down part of the column for layout purposes. “Things are funnier when they’re more concise, anyway.”
Besides writing, Makkai has worked as a Montessori teacher for elementary schoolers, a job she described, in one word, as “joyful.” Though she knows some writers who hate it, teaching was more than a way for Makkai to make a living. It is something she shares with her husband, who coincidentally works at the boarding school Makkai attended as a teenager and where the two now live with their kids. It is something she shares with her parents, who were both linguistics professors, bouncing back and forth from Chicago to its suburbs to Hong Kong. Learning, Makkai declared, is essential. Currently, she is studying Hungarian, with the hope to someday read her grandmother’s untranslated novels. “I would feel very sad if I wasn’t actively learning new things as an adult,” she explained.
In that spirit of learning, select students will have the opportunity to learn from Makkai as she spends the next couple of weeks on campus, visiting creative writing classes to both engage with and advise students.