This article is published in issue 19 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until May 7, 2024.
Crime news loves dead girls, it has a real obsession with minors with no criminal record. We may not even notice, but that’s how it is. In the mass media, crime victims are objectified and fetishized. Young, beautiful, rich. Death. Collective delirium ensues. Discussion groups on social media, bloggers conducting independent investigations, podcasts, television programs. Rebecca Makkai talks about this and other subtle deviations in the novel I have some questions to ask you, recently released by Bollati Boringhieri. And Rebecca talks about it with me, on a video call from Chicago.
Young, beautiful and dead: they are the stars of true crime.
«One of the main reasons why podcasts true crime they deal with female victims is the public: not everyone knows it, but it is mostly made up of women who identify more with female victims. And then the male victims have less interesting stories.”
In what sense?
«The man was killed over money issues, drugs, in an argument outside the bar. Sadly squalid stories.”
And women?
«Women are almost always killed in the home, their stories can speak to everyone. I believe that podcasts true crime serve as a survival course for many women. They learn to recognize certain signals, not to commit imprudent actions.”
The cover of I have some questions to ask you (Bollati Boringhieri) by Rebecca Makkai, 46 years old. An award-winning American author, Makkai was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2018 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2019.
Brandon Taylor
Only for what?
«And also to fix their gaze directly on the object of their fears. But there is also the male audience, who likes the young and beautiful victim for other reasons. But not entirely reprehensible. A mix of fetishism and desire for protection. By adding the interests of the male public and those of the female public, the victim model that emerges as the most popular is that represented by a very young girl, beautiful, white, rich and sexually active.”
At the center of his novel there is a news story just like in noirs. The true crime in question dates back to the 1990s and involves the murder of a seventeen-year-old in one boarding school, i.e. a high school with campus. She is married to a teacher and lives right on one’s campus boarding school.
«Do you see that door behind me? From there you enter the school. My husband and I live in a house on campus.”
So the idea to write a novel set on campus came to her from her real life.
«Yes, there boarding school it’s a fantastic place to set a novel: it’s closed, isolated, in the middle of the countryside, full of girls and boys in their teenage years. It’s a setting that inevitably leads you towards a noir plot. And so here is Thalia’s murder in the 90s, here is the rapid conclusion of the investigation that leads to the arrest of the only black person in the school, here is the protagonist, Bodie, Thalia’s roommate, who returns to that same college to distance of almost 30 years to hold a podcasting course, here are the doubts about that murder far back in time, the attempt to fill all the holes left by the investigation at the time, the battle to reopen the case”.
