I Have Some Questions For You is a novel published by Rebecca Makkai in 2023. The novel is a perfect example of fitting form to content. The protagonist is a podcaster and the plot revolves around a possibly unsolved murder in which the wrong man may have been fingered as the culprit. The very opening line of the novel will sound familiar to anyone who has ever listened to more than one true crime podcast: “You’ve heard of her." From that point forward, reading the book is not unlike listening to a podcast.
At the simplest level of narrative structure, the story follows the events taking place when a successful podcaster and film professor named Bodie Kane returns to the boarding school of her youth. The central event surrounding her memories is the mysterious violent murder of her roommate and the conviction of the athletic trainer working for the school, Omar Evans. Because the murder took place in 1995, the key piece of evidence is a videotaped presentation of a school performance of the musical Camelot. While the story branches out into a number of smaller subplots, what ties the entire thing together is the question that mirrors another being asked around the same. The book becomes all about answering the question of "who really killed Thalia Keith?" if it wasn't the man sent to prison for the crime.
And so, boiled down to basics, I Have Some Questions for You is a murder mystery. What gives this murder mystery a slight twist from the usual is the introduction of the podcasting element. The pressing question is whether this novel feels like reading a podcast because podcasts exist and the comparison can be made or because that is the intention. In other words, it may well be that the author did not intentionally try to match form to content. Passages like this lean the balance more heavily toward intent. "Zach Huber, a year above us, crashed in a helicopter in Iraq. Puja Sharma, who fled Granby a few weeks before graduation, died of a pill overdose two years later in her Sarah Lawrence dorm. Kellan TenEyck, just that previous spring, had been found in his car at the bottom of a lake." If one asks another person to read this passage—as well as much of the rest of the novel—while closing their eyes, it is likely to sound very much like listening to a true crime podcast.
Which, ultimately, is the point at which it seems almost certain the form was chosen specifically to match the content. One of the most common complaints against true crime podcasts is their focus on white female victims and the seemingly unavoidable undertones of voyeurism that such coverage of these crimes inevitably confronts. Along the way toward trying to figure out who really killed Thalia—if not the man convicted—the story pursues themes related to racism, exploitation of a true crime, and the many systemic problems associated with the American law enforcement structure. This is a novel that seems to have been written specifically for true crime podcast fans. Just plain fans of murder mysteries may find themselves at odds with the underlying "feel" of the book, however. It is less a murder mystery novel than it is a murder mystery podcast in written form with all its expected twists and unexpected subplots.
