69 pages • 2 hours read
Rebecca MakkaiI Have Some Questions for You
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Kurt Cobain
Content Warning: This section of the guide features depictions of suicide, self-harm, disordered eating, and sexual assault.
Much of the novel observes how youth and talent become sites of pain, a subject that Bodie and her cohost, Lance, discuss on Starlet Fever. Similarly, the story of Kurt Cobain offers a reflection for the painful price of fame and talent. Kurt Cobain, the lead singer of Nirvana and the epitome of 1990s grunge and angst, dies by suicide while Bodie attends Granby. Bodie invokes his image throughout the novel, intertwining his fate with that of Thalia. Both appear destined for further greatness, and both die young, frozen in the 1990s. By connecting his death to Thalia, Bodie shows how Cobain’s death symbolizes the destruction of innocence and the loss of youthful talent. Bodie recalls that, following his death, “Clover Music sold copies of his suicide note” (105). She had taped a “Xerox of a Xerox” (105) above her bed, and the seemingly macabre mementos solidified Thalia’s friends’ distaste for Bodie. While Thalia found the display touching, her friends Beth and Rachel imagined that Bodie would harm herself next. (Whether this was mockery or genuine concern for Thalia remains unknown.) After seeing the makeshift shrine, Beth had told Thalia that she shouldn’t dismiss the note’s presence, warning Thalia to “wait till [she finds Bodie] hanging from the ceiling” (105).
Thalia’s friends connect Bodie and Cobain, but the novel considers how Thalia and Cobain’s losses of life at a young age can be exploited to serve others’ agendas, even as their premature deaths bring about grief and pain. Cobain’s memory haunts Bodie, and Beth and Rachel suggest that his death will provoke Bodie to harm herself. In the same way, the narrative shows the exploitation of Thalia’s case through the media frenzy and Granby’s power to force a quick end to the case.
Camelot
This musical, based on T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, tells the story of King Arthur, Lancelot, and Guinevere, and the problems that arise once Guinevere falls in love with Lancelot. White’s framing of the illicit love between Guinevere and Lancelot is based on medieval source material. Recorded during its opening night at Granby, this performance represents the last recording of Thalia alive and, for many of her classmates, is the last time they will ever see her. Thus, Granby and the mythical Camelot share many similarities. Nestled in the woods, Granby rises like Arthur’s castle, surrounded by the townspeople of Kern. Camelot symbolizes the fiction that Granby maintains and the truth it hides, for just as Arthur and Guinevere are doomed, so are Mike and Beth. The king and queen of Camelot struggle later, as Mike, who played Arthur, struggles with his guilt having helped send Omar to prison. Beth, who played Guinevere, views her years at Granby as her worst, harassed, abused, and assaulted by her own boyfriend. As Lester Holt tries to show on Dateline, the ending performance of Camelot demonstrates that Thalia will never have a happy ending, as he grasps “at the end for Camelot parallels, something about ‘no happy-ever-afters’” (219). Like Camelot, Granby offers almost no happy endings—whether through suicide attempts, car crashes, or cancer, Thalia’s peers find little peace, even as they still see the promise of a Granby education.
Granby Pay Phones
Bodie discovers that the phone in the gym lobby allows her to hear other conversations and to gain knowledge about her peers. Foreshadowing her work on podcasts, the phone symbolizes the lure of seeking answers by any means necessary, and such investigatory skills, while arguably unethical, serve her well as an adult in her creation of true-crime podcasts. As she admits, “[B]y junior year, I couldn’t pass [a phone] without picking up the receiver, pressing a single number, and listening—because there was at least one phone on which, if you did this, you could hear another conversation through the static” (13). Obsessed with these phones the way she will eventually be drawn to stories of Old Hollywood and the murder case of Thalia, Bodie listens through the static, signifying the difficulties of hearing others, finding the truth through “decades of misinformation and bias” (81). Bodie characterizes this practice as one of the “few superpowers in life” (15), admitting that “it was simply part of a broader habit: I collected information about my peers the way some people hoard newspapers” (15). Yet ironically, the information she collects seems less valuable than the information she misses, so intent on listening that she doesn’t see what’s in plain sight, reducing her to seeking for answers and asking those all-important questions years after the fact.
