Five Star Book: The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai

When I posted this picture on my Instagram, I began getting comments (both on that platform and by text) from a wide range of friends and family saying something along the lines of ‘This book destroyed me, but you’re going to love it so much.’

And…they were all completely correct. This book is a beautiful exploration of a lot of things that are specific cultural interests (read – obsessions) of mine: Chicago (specifically Northwestern), the art world (specifically the way archives and provenance impact it), narratives of the American AIDS epidemic (I know that’s weird, but honestly, growing up a theater nerd in a post Angels in America/RENT world it’s not that strange I promise), and cults. That seems like a lot, I know, and there is a lot of plot contained in these 418 pages, but it never feels like too much.

Or, it always feels like too much, but not because there are too many exploitative twists (which longtime readers will know I do not appreciate), instead the “too-much-ness” comes from a place of real emotion. I understand completely why everyone was reaching out to tell me they felt destroyed by this book. There were points where I had to stop to gather myself because I was crying too hard to see, and then something equally horrifying would happen on the next page and set me off again.

This probably isn’t reading as a sales pitch, but I promise that’s what it is. I actually think everyone should read this book (with a box of tissues), because at its heart it’s a book about survival and the weight of living through historical traumas. At one point a character, says to another, “I hate that we have to live in the middle of history. We make enough mess on our own.” And I had to stop, get up, get a pen and underline it a million times, because even though it was far from the most beautiful line in the book (aside from anything else Makkai’s prose is gorgeous), it gave me such a fissure of recognition. Who didn’t, at some point in 2020, think to themselves, “God I would love some precendented times.”

Makkai tells the story of the people who lived through, and were killed by, a horror that was taking place in the city I was born in as I was born into it, with such empathy that I felt like I was living it too (and not just because I could picture the streets she describes transforming in their post-transformation state).

To paraphrase my friends, it destroyed me, but in the best way.