Artists' Chat: Rebecca Makkai

I went to a party in February 2020, and somebody was talking about Rebecca Makkai. They had just read and loved The Great Believers, Makkai's novel about a friend group devastated by the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. Another person joined in, a handful more—they had also loved The Great Believers. Shouting across the room, we bonded over the friendships' realism, the surprise of different scenes. Makkai's writing sparks an intimacy with her characters that, in conversation with a stranger, makes you feel like you share common friends.

Makkai's writing in her latest novel I Have Some Questions For You shares this intensity. Podcaster-film professor Bodie Kane investigates her roommate's decades-old murder at their boarding school. I found myself equally invested in the excavated relationships between Bodie and her former classmates, as Bodie's mission to track down key suspects.

Makkai's other novels include The Borrower and The Hundred-Year House. Music for Wartime is her short story collection. The Great Believers received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Based in Chicago, Makkai is Artistic Director at StoryStudio Chicago and instructs fiction writing at graduate programs including Northwestern University.

In this interview for Blankie, Rebecca Makkai shares her thoughts on mental health and art.

As a writer, you capture intense emotions, characters coping with illness and loss. How do you protect your own mental health when immersed in tragedy?

It's not that I see writing as therapy, but when I'm writing fiction I do have a place to immediately process any difficult emotions coming up in the subject matter. When I was researching The Great Believers, I spent a lot of time talking with people who were recounting and reliving their AIDS stories—and it was incredibly emotionally intense, as it should have been. But then I always had something to do right away with those feelings, a place to put them, a place to work them out.

What art do you turn to when you're trying to get by emotionally?

Sometimes you need pure distraction: cheap reality TV (Love Is Blind!) or really good art that's deeply escapist and immersive (White Lotus)... If I were seriously reeling from something, I'd most likely turn to poetry. And then sometimes you just have to cast about until you find what works. After the 2016 election, I couldn't read anything for weeks and then I finally started rereading Macbeth, and it was perfect. Cathartic and germane.

What keeps you going, in life and in the creative process?

I do feel a huge sense of purpose in my writing. I feel at this point like I'm telling stories that people need to hear. The Great Believers was a turning point for me that way, just understanding that something I wrote could have a big impact on people. It was my fourth book, but something really changed there. And if you feel like you have something vital to say, you can't wait to say it. It keeps you going when you doubt the work, and it keeps you going as a person. Of course, that's easy for me to say now, having found that audience. Early on, there was absolutely no one waiting for my work. So maybe it was just an outsized sense of ambition.

If I'm being totally honest, one of the things that keeps me going is astrology; there are days when I believe in it and days when I don't, but when I was young my parents studied it pretty seriously and they had a teacher who read my birth chart in depth and pretty much nailed my life. He said I'd either be a successful actor or writer, and he said many other things that are dead-on accurate. Of course it might all be a self-fulfilling prophecy, but then not everyone who believes they can make it in the arts actually does, right? He also said I'd have a long life. So if he was right about other things, maybe he's right about that too. In any case, it doesn't hurt me to believe this stuff. Astrology requires nothing of you; you don't have to tithe or act a certain way or feel guilty about sex or judge other people. So why not? On the days when I do believe in it, I find it reassuring, that maybe there's some kind of broader fate out there. There's a lot less harm in that (in my opinion) than in latching onto a religion that tells you the world is divided into the holy and the sinful.

Photo: Brett Simison

You've written on your Substack about living with ADHD and your helpful work adaptations. Can you share more about your experiences seeking treatment and support for ADHD?

I was only diagnosed about five years ago, in my early forties, and it's been such a wild revelation. So obvious, and yet I was oblivious to it for so long, not understanding at all what ADHD really was. It wasn't hard in my case to get diagnosed; I started giving the doctor examples from the distant and recent past and she got it within about two minutes. Of course there was further work involved, but I was able to get on medication pretty quickly, and although I have to take a very low dose because of a heart issue, it does help a lot. It also just helps to know that I'm not lazy—that I can pay attention to my mental state on a given day and instead of beating myself up, I can analyse whether there's something that will help me focus, or I can move on to other tasks that are more suited to where my mind is. There are people out there who get very upset if you talk about the "superpowers" of ADHD (hyperfocus, etc.), maybe because it downplays the fact that this is, medically, a "disorder," but I absolutely don't understand that line of thinking. I mostly love the way my brain works, and the problem is that the world doesn't always accommodate people like me.

What would you say to a Blanket Gravity reader who may be struggling with their mental health?

I don't know that I have good advice for the most serious kinds of struggle—I’m not the person anyone should be listening to there—but I do think it's useful, when you're in a good headspace, to make a list of the things that ground you and make you happy. As long a list as possible—favorite foods and movies and places and music and books and poetry and absolutely everything. When things are medium-bleak, that's your mental health menu. The one time I literally made a physical list like this was in college, and I remember one time pulling it out, scanning it, and deciding that what I needed was to eat a PBJ under a tree on the quad and listen to Bob Dylan on my Walkman. I did, and it was amazing. (I'm allergic to peanuts now, so I look back on this moment with particular longing.) At the time, "self-care" was not a phrase I'd ever heard—maybe no one was using it yet—but that's what it was, an act of conscious self-care. Of course you can't self-care yourself out of a serious mental health crisis, but having a list like that helps a lot. My list is mental now, but just as real and just as helpful.