Book Talk

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Murky Moral Territory: A Conversation with Rebecca Makkai

Mostly known for her short stories, Rebecca Makkai’s first venture into the world of novels proves to be just as comical and thought-provoking as her popular stories.  The Borrower chronicles the tale of the young librarian Lucy who enters into an unconventional friendship with Ian, a young boy forced to enroll in anti-gay classes by his controlling mother.  Lucy's attempts to help Ian result in an unintentional kidnapping, and she is forced to face dark secrets from her family’s past as well as reevaluate her own moral values.  In the following interview, Makkai discusses making the switch from short stories to a novel, insights into her characters, and a preview of her second novel.

Public Libraries: I know you’ve authored several short stories prior to The Borrower.  How does the process of writing a short story differ from that of writing a novel?

Rebecca Makkai: With a short story, you can actually sit back and see the whole thing in one take.  You can get a feel for the pacing. You can print it out and lay it out across your floor. You can see what you’ve done and you can edit.  You can even throw away a whole short story without feeling like you’ve wasted years of your life. It’s very hard with a novel to get a sense of your pacing until you take time to sit back and try to read the whole thing in one day.   You have to just sequester yourself and go from start to finish to see what proportion of time you spent on one subject and who’s being neglected or what story line has been dropped partway through. With a short story you can paint with much broader strokes because you only have a sentence or two to establish a character or a theme. In a novel, that can come across as overkill. The Borrower is full of larger than life characters so I wasn’t going for subtlety much of the time.  You can get away with some of the really outlandish things people say in a short story just to establish their character in such a short amount of time. It ends up coming across much larger in a novel, which is ironic because the novel is so much longer.
 
PL: Do you plan on turning any of your short stories into a full length novel?

RM: I don’t know. My second novel, which I’m working on right now, started as a short story but I never published it. My problem was that it was ridiculously long. I finished this short story and it was 12,000 words, or maybe I’m thinking of 20,000 words, which is way too long to publish as a short story. I kept trying to chop it and then I’d leave it alone for a while and I’d come back six months later and try to chop it again.  Finally, I realized the reason it wasn’t working was I actually had more to tell, not less. With my stories, I certainly wouldn’t rule out coming back to any one of them. I think I have a lot of fondness for all of them. There are none of them that I would say I’d never want to touch again and do something more with.

I have several short stories that are at boarding schools or colleges. One possibility that I have in mind is to put together a set of linked stories about life on a boarding school campus which is actually where I live. That’s kind of something I’m toying with, although I don’t know if it’s actually going to pan out. It’s funny because I first came up with the idea years ago and I dismissed it because I thought that seemed so elitist.  Nobody would want to read about that.  But then you look at the success of a book like Prep and people are fascinated by that, whether it’s because it evokes real memories for them or because it’s sort of the fantasy of the boarding school. But it’s something I’m playing around with and it might happen in the future.

PL: Why did you choose the method of Lucy reflecting on what happened instead of using a present point of view?

RM: That’s a good question. I haven’t thought about it too much. It just seemed very natural. But I would guess that a lot of it had to do with the length of time that it took me to write the book.  Like I said, I started not very much in earnest. It was just notes here and there. I started with the basic idea about ten years ago which means since I’m 33 now, I was 23 at the time. I was sort of younger than this narrator and then ended up being quite a bit older than her. As you know, when I started writing she was someone very close to my own age.  I was very idealistic like she was but she’s certainly not me. I don’t have that much in common with her except in terms of a world view of being in your early twenties and that righteous indignation you can feel at that age.  You still have it later but it's tempered with a lot of other stuff by that point.

When I started writing, at least in terms of age and world view, I probably associated a lot more with her.  Returning to the book later, I wrote and abandoned and wrote and abandoned.  By the time I was really wrapping things up and editing, it really seemed like my own experience was looking back at sort of a previous way of seeing the world. I would imagine that’s why it felt so natural for me to adopt that as the narrator’s viewpoint - that she’s someone living with the consequences of her actions, looking back older, sadder, wiser and able in that way to poke a lot of fun at herself. Maybe if it were told in the present progressive viewpoint, that ironic distance wouldn’t have been possible for her.

The other reason honestly is that her narrative is modeled very consciously on the narratives of a lot of other runaway or road trip books, one of them being Lolita. Lolita, of course, is narrated by the viewpoint of a man who’s in jail, talking about this many years after the fact.  It’s not so much the choice was a reference to that book but that it partook of the same tradition of looking back at previous escapades with a great deal of regret.

PL: Lucy warns the readers from the beginning that she might be the villain of the story, but whether she is or not is kind of ambiguous. Can you talk about how you perceive her character to be? Is she a kidnapper or was she kidnapped?

RM: The reason I had so much fun with it is because it’s very murky moral territory.  Certainly, by the time all is said and done, she’s definitely done things wrong and broken laws. As the reader, it’s really easy to look at it and go, you shouldn’t have done any of that stuff. But what’s really hard to look at, at least for her, is where would you stop? Where would you draw the line?

It’s really not wrong for her to say I’m going to drive you home to your parents’ house. It’s not really wrong for her to say okay, I’m going to drive you to your grandmother’s house. Whereas, we’ve been driving for a while, he’s really upset, she doesn’t want to drop him off in this semi-abusive situation. Let’s just drive around for a little while. You can calm down. Before she knows, it’s too late to turn around.

Quite accidentally, she’s crossed state lines and can’t turn the car around. The point at which things have crossed over into villain territory is really unclear. She's using the word villain in a moral and literary sense rather than a straight question of having broken the law. She’s obviously broken the law. She’s obviously made some really bad decisions. My moral viewpoint is obviously that, for the parents, it’s their child. They have the right to raise the child no matter how much someone might wish to interfere, no matter how much we all think we might know better looking at a situation from the outside. Unless there are laws being broken, we don’t have the right to intervene. What they’re doing to him is not illegal. Whether it should be is another question.  I kind of personally feel it should be. 

The other way to look at the question is by the end of the book, has she done more harm than good?  It’s a matter of time. You have no idea how this kid is going to turn out.  Is there going to be a reputation surrounding this child now in his town and neighborhood that’s going to be harmful to him in the future? At the same time, you could say she showed him a totally different world that was possible. She left him at the end of the book with this sort of gift to see him through the rest of his childhood that she thinks could really help him.

In my mind, I do have sort of an ending to the story of how Ian turned out.  The last line of the book is actually very ambiguous on that matter. You could argue that she probably messed him up for life or you could argue that she saved him.

PL: When you started the book you weren’t a parent yet and now you are. Do you think that changes your view of what Lucy did?

RM: I never felt that she had the right to do what she did.  I never agreed with what she did. She doesn’t agree with what she did.  One thing that comes up several times in the book is how she cannot even let herself begin to think about the parents. She knew she was making a mistake and she made it anyway.  But as a parent I do know that before you have kids you always think you’re going to be a perfect parent.  No one ever is a perfect parent.

But I do, on a personal level, aside from anything in the book, feel that what they’re doing to their child is a form of child abuse.  Their child shouldn’t necessarily be taken away from them but, they need some kind of intervention, probably not this kind of intervention, but family therapy of some kind.  That would help them because they, in my personal opinion, are doing something really awful.

PL:  Lucy tried to use her position as a librarian to expose Ian to new ideas. Can you talk a little bit about the role libraries and librarians can have in opening new worlds for patrons in that type of situation?

RM: I think one thing that’s been really interesting to me over the years is I’ve heard so many stories from gay adults about their first encounter with any kind of understanding of their own gender or sexual identity within the library. One person in particular once told me that, when he was about 11, he snuck into his school library, got the dictionary, took it to the end of the library aisle, and crouched on the floor to look up the world gay.  If I remember right, someone had called him that. He wanted to know what it was. You know, he figured it out. But in this dictionary that was his moment of, "Oh my gosh, that’s exactly what I haven’t been able to put into words." Hopefully, in this day and age, there are better resources than the dictionary, although it might be a good place to start.

I think the amazing thing about a library, whether it’s the public library or the school library for children, is you’re able to access anything that anyone’s ever felt and had the need to write down over time. The fiction of being different, which is this huge and wonderful theme throughout children’s literature from fairy tales like the Ugly Duckling through a lot of current young adult literature, is a tremendous salvation. It might not always be put in very literal and specific terms about gender or sexuality but that sense of sort of brotherhood with all these people who have written all of these books about the outsider, about being different, is so much more a theme of children’s literature than of adult literature.

Adult literature can be narrated by an outsider in a way, like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. He’s an outsider but it’s not the same kind of story.  Basically, the Ugly Duckling is what so many kids’ books are.

PL: I think that message is easier to convey in children’s books and it’s easier for children to accept such a simple message. But as we get older I think you  lose that belief that it gets better because things aren't.

RM: I think there has been a lot of debate lately online and an article in the Wall Street Journal condemning current young adult literature as being violent and dystopian among various things. While I do agree that it's gotten more violent, I think the issue with the young adult label is that it’s often being read by kids rather than young adults.  A seven-year-old kid picking up picking up Mockingjay, there’s a problem with that.  But for teenagers, fifteen, sixteen, or seventeen-year-olds, these are people who are almost old enough that we would ask them to go fight in a war.

People are saying that we have to shield them from the violence in the books. There’s something very cathartic I think about reading something that might be really shocking or horrible but then seeing the triumph of an individual in that situation. That’s exactly what teenagers need. On sort of a gentler level for children’s books you look at Roald Dahl and the awful situations those characters are in.

Matilda is very intentionally the first children’s book that’s referenced in my novel because it’s about this little girl who just had horrible, horrible parents and this horrible principal at her school.  People around her are violent and abusive and yet she finds someone to help her.   She discovers that she’s magical, which I think is the escapist fantasy part for every child who reads that book.  Some of them need that story more than others. Ian is certainly one who needed that particular story.

PL: Have you thought about expanding, maybe doing a young adult novel or a children’s novel yourself?

RM: Honestly, I would not want to write one in the near future because I would not, given the subject of The Borrower, want to be labeled as a young adult author. I’ve been a little nervous when people have referred to The Borrower as great for all ages, because it’s not.. There’s a lengthy Nabokov reference on the first page. There’s drinking.  There’s swearing. I certainly would not want my child to pick it up when she’s six or eleven for that matter.

Now I teach ages nine through twelve but I used to teach ages six through nine.  When I taught that class, I actually wrote them a book and I would read them a chapter every day.  I would write a little bit every day and read it to them. Someday, I hope I’ll publish it but I need to do some other adult stuff first, which I think is a silly reason. It’s just what I am inspired to do right now.

My oldest daughter is three right now. I imagine that as she gets older and is reading chapter books I will be very inspired to write something for someone her age so that she can understand what it is I do.

PL:  In the book, Lucy is a librarian.  Where did you get the inspiration for her? I read somewhere that you worked as a librarian for two summers?

RM: I worked in a graduate school library so it was very, very different.  It was part time and very relaxed. The reason I even applied for the job was that I was already well into writing The Borrower and I wanted a little bit of actual experience behind a library desk.

I grew up with a wonderful children’s library in the basement of my public library. It was one of those places that if I had run away from home at ten-years-old it is almost definitely where I would have gone. It was partly because I loved to read but it was also just that it was a magical place.  I always thought it was haunted and I would spend hours there.

I have so many memories of just pulling things off the shelf and discovering them for the first time and of the programs they would do there, like the summer reading clubs where you would go in and every five books you’d get a sticker on your little cutout spaceship on the wall. I actually think that’s something parents need to remember too as we get more into eBooks.  The actual physical space of the library is really magical.  It can inspire children to become lifelong readers.

As I went about my job as a teacher, I’d go into the children’s section pretty frequently to check out books on Michelangelo or Magellan or whoever. Having this weekly revisit to this place from my past was pretty inspiring for the setting.  The physical space of the library and the feel of it are a few things that I might have forgotten from my own childhood, like how there are puppets everywhere and that kind of thing.

I didn’t specifically set out at first to make the book about libraries. I set out to make it a book about this child in a situation that was going to an adult for help.  Once I made her the librarian, suddenly it also became a book about books which it hadn’t been up until that point.

PL: The part where Lucy talks about how she misses the old card system is such a great tribute to the past. With the advent of eBooks and everything being online, it will definitely be a different experience when the next generation interacts with the library.

RM: Certain libraries are literally just like I described. The old borrower card is still in the pocket in the front of the book.  It’s just that no one ever bothered peeling it out of there. I was in the public library in the town where I grew up and I started looking at some of the books and I found the name of one of my best friends still in this random 7th or 8th volume of the Oz series. I took a picture of it with my phone and sent it to him.

They’re still there and I love that. I love that it was my generation whose names are still in there.  Their names are still in Misty of Chincoteague for all eternity. I just like that a lot.

PL: The Borrower is essentially a road trip story.  What do you think the characters are seeking to find? Was Lucy trying to reconcile her past or have some sort of self-discovery?

RM: That’s certainly not on her mind in any way when she leaves town. I think there’s a point in the book where she says about herself, “You’re probably reading this wondering what I was running away from.” “What was my reason to leave?” she says honestly, “there was nothing.” She was not running away from anything. She’s certainly bored with her job and there are elements where she’s unhappy in her town.  But those are simply things I think that makes it easier for her to leave or at least easier not to end up coming back.  People reading the book might look for her deep-seated motivation in fleeing town. There is none.

Her motivation is really and honestly to help this child and also at a certain point, not to get put in jail. She doesn’t intend to drive him to Vermont. She intends to drive him around for an hour or two until she realizes she can’t go back. Along the way a lot ends up happening that makes her reevaluate her heritage. Even at the beginning, she talks about the things her parents have passed down genetically that have made her the person she is. When she realizes that some of her family history is very, very dark and that she’s doing something very disturbing at the same time, she has to reconcile that and forgive her father for some of the things he’d done in his past.

For Ian, we don’t entirely ever know exactly everything that’s going on in his mind because it’s not from his point of view.  You could debate all day to what extent he’s really trying to manipulate Lucy. He certainly is a manipulative child. I think he’s not making everything up by any means, but you could argue that we don’t know if he’s exaggerating. We don’t know how bad it really is and he absolutely tricks her into getting him on the road.

I think that the reason he wants to get out of there to begin with is probably fairly undefined to him just as his sexuality is fairly undefined. He’s ten-years- old so he’s not really sitting there thinking, “Gosh, I’m gay and my parents don’t like it.”  That might be the reason a fifteen-year-old would run away.  He’s not even entirely clear on what this class is that they’re sending him to, just that he knows it makes him very uncomfortable.  His mother seems like an absolute piece of work and she’s doing things that  really de-center him as a person.

His entire escape, regardless of how much of it is a little bit of a show, is basically one giant panic attack against things being done to him that he knows on some very deep level are wrong.  He knows that he needs to get out of there and he wants to have an adventure. He’s a kid and he thinks this is really fun.

One thing I thought about a lot in writing the story, although it wasn’t anything that I referenced directly was the O. Henry short story “The Ransom of Red Chief."   This boy has been kidnapped for ransom but he thinks that it’s the greatest thing that ever happened and it’s such a marvelous adventure. He’s playing Indian chief and playing pirate and there’s this level on which he’s too young to really understand the gravity of the situation. He just knows that he’s having the time of his life.

PL: Do you feel that Lucy's guilt over her high school friend's suicide drove her to help Ian?

RM: I think far too many of us know someone who grew up gay and their life ended very badly one way or the other. I’m not sure that she feels direct guilt that she should have been responsible for saving Darren back in high school. But at the very least she knows the stakes. She’s looking at this kid knowing exactly where he will end up if things continue the way they’re going.  Their sexuality isn’t going to change, but their parents aren’t going to change either. It’s going to be eight or ten more years of hell.  Those are the kids who end up as real runaways, living in the park somewhere or dead. So many of them, by just sheer will and through some kind of personal miracle, end up being completely fine, stable adults, but it’s far from all of them.

She has that risk fully in mind, especially at the point where she sees him break down.  There’s a point when she was starting to drive him that she thinks he’s jumped out of the car. She realizes he’s actually just sobbing in the floor of the back seat. She feels his back and he’s just steaming hot and sweaty and it’s really a panic attack. That’s the moment where she fully gets that as morally questionable as everything else she does in the book is, she knows that she could not just turn around and drop him back off on his parents’ doorstep at that moment.  Not just because she sees a sobbing kid but because she knows to what extremes that same loss of the sense of self will take him when he’s eighteen or nineteen-years-old.

PL: So barring from doing anything kind of illegal a la Lucy, what would you recommend for readers or anyone who do have people in their lives who are struggling with their sexuality? What kind of sites or organizations would you recommend for them?

RM: The It Gets Better Project is this phenomenal thing that’s come on the scene just in the past year. If kids at least have internet access, they can see some of these videos and feel some kinship with these people talking to them. They are now putting out a book and they’re going to try to get into libraries with a lot of the same sort of testimonials that have been on the internet but also with some original material.  That’s going to be available for kids who maybe couldn’t get on the internet especially if their only access is at home. They couldn’t sit there and look at that in the school library with people looking over their shoulder but maybe they can get that book smuggled out under their shirt or something.

There’s this organization called Believe Out Loud of religiously affiliated people who are activists for gay rights.  I think different churches become involved with this program and they have an amazing Web site also. When people see children in this situation, it’s very often the parents who need the intervention.  There are organizations like PFLAG which give support to parents who might not have thought that they had to deal with that kind of thing.  A lot of schools are getting better at providing the support to guidance counselors through organizations within the school. Unfortunately, it is not true in all parts of the country.

PL:What books influenced you as you wrote The Borrower?

RM: Obviously, the book is full of references to children’s literature and Lucy also has her own frame of reference with adult books.  Many of the ones that she refers to are sort of the classic American road novels. A lot of those same road novels are sort of kidnapping novels like Huck Finn and Lolita.  Another thing that a lot of them have in common is that they’re traditionally banned books, which is the case for both Huck Finn and Lolita but also with books like Catcher in the Rye and Ulysses.  

I  looked at those books a lot as I wrote, not so much to draw references from them but to see how they were structured and what those master craftsmen did once you get your characters on the road.  It’s really boring if they just drive. Whose perspective is it from? What is the power struggle in different kinds of mutual kidnappings like with Huck and Jim in Huck Finn?  I kept those close at hand when I wrote.

The other thing that I wanted to borrow from traditional children’s literature was just the sense of fun.  This is going to be an adventure story and they’re going to meet crazy characters along the way. Obviously, The Wizard of Oz is a big reference point.  At one point early in the novel, Lucy’s neighbor Tim talks about getting Ian started on the Oz series.  He was saying that this is the thing I would recommend for kids who might be gay because it’s this crazy road trip and everyone’s different and they just kind of collect people along the way.  Part of the allure of the Oz culture to the gay community is that it’s a completely eclectic cast of characters but there’s just full acceptance of all of them.

I did create a lot of characters who are larger than life.  There are some broad brush strokes and some very wacky people in this novel. That was definitely a nod to the tradition of children’s literature. If I’d made very subtle realistic and dry portrayals along the way it wouldn’t have had that same sort of Oz adventure story feel to it that I wanted.

PL: Do you think Lucy was able to accept "her crime" at the end?  You talked about Oz and how everybody was accepted for what they did.  Do you think Lucy finds similar acceptance?

RM: Are you asking if she forgives herself? I think she’s still waiting to see at the end of the novel.  She talks about how old he would be and how this happened five years in the past.  But that’s not enough time yet to answer her initial question in that very first sentence of the book of whether she’s a villain.

If in five more years, she discovers that he’s a really happy twenty-year-old whom his parents have come to accept or maybe he’s managed to break free of his family and is having a really fulfilling life, she is going to know that in a sort of moral universe beyond the law that perhaps the end justified the means. But she’s not sure that that’s what she’s going to find in five or ten years.  There’s also a very real possibility that she’s made things worse by trying to help.  What she did, as misguided as it was, came out of, in many ways, her best intentions.

I don’t think anyone truly regrets something that they did for altruistic reasons, even with a bad result.  The end of the book leaves us waiting.  There are other fifteen-year-old boys where we don’t know how they’re going to turn out. Some will turn out really well. Some will not.  It didn’t feel right to slap an ending on saying, "And then you came out in your sophomore year of college."

It also didn’t feel right to know that everything ended horribly.  It just wasn’t going to be a fun book.  I hate novels that end ambiguously if the ambiguity is only on the reader’s side. The narrator knows what happened, the author knows what happened, but they’re just not telling us and we’re left to come up with our own conclusions. It’s ambiguous in that we don’t quite know how things turned out because that is still in the future. And I imagine that, you know, although this is an adult novel there will be a bit of a young adult readership for it. I imagine there will be fifteen-year-olds who read it, some of whom might be in a situation like Ian’s.  We need to do more to make these things better. Things aren’t just going to be great. As a society, we need to look out for people like this and ensure a happier ending.

It’s funny because several of the reviews I’ve read have talked about this kind of hopeful note that it ends on and how she, the narrator, believes in the power of books to save people. There is that hope there but I also see a kind of real darkness in that last sentence like the last line of The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway. The last line [of The Borrower] is obviously about something completely different but there’s an element in that last line for me of “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” Let’s say that this all turns out right, but if it did I would be telling you that.  I’m saying let’s pretend it does, which is hopeful, but it’s also very cautious.  How people read that last chapter and that last line will be a little bit of a Rorschach test.

PL: Can you tell me a little bit more about what you’re working on next?

RM: Definitely.  I’m not ruling out the idea of doing a story collection so that’s in the works. The novel that I’m working on right now is tentatively called The Happensack, which is a made up word.  It’s the story of a haunted house and a haunted family but it’s told in reverse. So the first section is in 1999 and then it moves backwards in time all the way back to 1900. So as it goes, you find out things that you heard about in 1999. You find out what the background story was when you read, for instance 1955, who that person actually was. 

It’s fun to do something that’s in part historical because I get to do a lot of research, but it’s not really a historical novel. It’s not about world events or anything like that.  It’s just about this one really strange family and it’s set on the North Shore of Chicago where I live. It’s really fun to have the local connection and be able to sort of drive around town.  Much in the way that I looked around the children’s section of the library with wide open eyes when I was writing The Borrower, things like driving my daughter to school in the morning and looking out the window gets me thinking about the world of my novel.

PL: Well thank you so much for your time and thank you so much for calling. I had a great time talking to you. You are such a great writer.

RM: Oh, that’s sweet. Thank you. So you’re an intern? Is that right?

PL:  I am. I’m actually a library student so I’m studying to be a librarian.

RM: Oh, that’s great.  Since you’re a library student I have to say this is the one thing I feel really bad about in the book.  I used to have this whole explanation for why she does not have an MLIS degree. This whole thing about how she was supposed to be taking these classes and then she was lying and wasn’t taking the classes.  Then her boss was making excuses, covering for her, and this whole thing of who she could have been working there without it.

I wanted her to be really young working there.  I wanted her to have been there for a while but I didn’t want her to be a year older in order to have a degree.  Also, I wanted her to have gotten the job sort of accidentally. Anyway, some of the first people to get the book are librarians and half of their whole thing is always, “Why doesn’t she have an MLIS degree?” I edited that part out because I thought it was really boring and then it turns out that people really care about why she does not have the degree.

PL: In my head I just thought because her boss was an alcoholic and hired her because she didn’t really care that much about her library.

RM: That’s basically exactly it.  Originally, it was that Lucy was going to take these classes and Lorraine obviously is not running the best library in town. Thank you for filling in the gap. That’s kind of exactly what I intended but I deeply wounded some librarians by leaving that out. Basically, it’s two paragraphs of this long explanation.  I just felt like it wasn’t really relevant to the story and people who aren’t librarians wouldn’t care tremendously about what her qualifications for the job are. I wish I could put it back in just to make things right.  In my mind, it’s not simply an oversight.  There was this whole reason behind it but it just didn’t end up on the page.