‘I Have Some Questions For You’ is a powerful, thought-provoking, sometimes very uncomfortable-to-read book.

What it’s not is a cold-case murder mystery or a thriller. The story doesn’t have and isn’t meant to have the tension and punch of a thriller or the plot twists and surprises of a murder mystery.

I was initially disappointed in the book because I’d picked it up thinking that it was a genre read about a woman drawn into the re-investigation, twenty years after the event. of a 1995 murder on the campus of the high school she was attending. By genre standards, this was a slow, laborious read. I realised that I either had to set the genre standards aside or set the book aside. I stuck with the book and I’m glad I did.

I experienced the first quarter of the book as a descent into the mind of Bodie Kane, a depressed, anxious, intelligent woman who, from the surface view of her life, appears to be not just coping but demonstrably successful but who, beneath the surface, is so unsure of herself that she routinely provides herself with a plausible narrative that masks her real concerns on motivations.

Returning to her old school to teach a course on film and to coach students on preparing podcasts pushes her to re-examine the personae that she’s created for herself in the past twenty years. As she compares her adult self to the girl she was in high school, she struggles to understand how she did not see then what she can see now. It was well done but I found it suffocating and depressing and not at all what I would normally look for in a genre read.

In Part I of the book (sixty chapters and about sixty per cent of the novel)the function of the murder mystery was to provide a context for displaying how fragile our memories are, to expose the entropic nature of our sense of self and to describe how our sense of self can deform under pressure.

For example, there are several chapters, positioned at strategic points in the narrative, devoted to imagining each of the main characters as having been the killer. In a genre mystery, these chapters would have been there to advance the detective towards the solution of the crime while misdirecting the reader with red herrings and partial information. It seemed to me that this was not what these chapters were there to do. As was made to live through a teenage girl’s murder time after time, two things stood out for.me: firstly how many men posed a plausible threat to this young woman and secondly how skilled our imaginations are at selecting threads of memory and weaving them into the story we would like to believe.

Part 1 is an intense, intimate, two-week journey of reassessment for Bodie Kane. It was an immersive experience that was also tough going at times because what I was being immersed in was a close-up and personal experience of Bodie Kane coming apart as she questioned everything about her understanding of who she is and who she has been. 

Part 1 is set in 2018, the first year of #MeToo, and, as Bodie Kane re-examines her life on campus in 1995 she realises how many misogynistic and abusive actions she glossed over or failed to identify. When, during those two weeks, her husband is accused on social media of having been a sexual predator fifteen years earlier, Bodie Kane finds herself considering the truth of the claim and asking herself, “What did I not know and when did I not know it?“‘. It’s not long before she starts asking the same questions about the events on campus in 1995.

Bodie Kane’s journey stops being about investigating a cold case and becomes about un-editing her own history, or perhaps rewriting it, to see what she refused or was unable to see in 1995. In resisting her own high school existence, Bodie Kane is forced to acknowledge that High School teens are vulnerable because that are still more children than adults. This hits her hard because she’s revisiting the teenager she once was, in the places she once inhabited, and seeing the paths not taken, the obstacles imagined, the threats not assessed and the oppressions not challenged.  This unacknowledged vulnerability is one reason why the misogyny and abuse were also unacknowledged. I think Bodie Kane was struggling with a difficult question for the MeToo generation: How did we let this happen? The answer offered here seems to be: Because we couldn’t see it then.

The pace of the book changes abruptly in Part 2, the last third of the novel. A few years have gone by. The atmosphere is now less an anxious ‘Am I crazy to think this? Do I really remember this? Is this all my fault?‘ and more a detached‘This is out of my hands now. I’ll testify and see where the chips fall.’

Most of the action of Part 2 takes place in the courtroom. If this was a thriller, I would have expected some drama in the courtroom with dramatic disclosures and witnesses recanting their statements under cross-examination. This isn’t a thriller and there’s no drama here, just further opportunities to reflect on whether the people we grew up with change or whether we never knew them that well in the first place. In her role as witness, Bodie Kane isn’t allowed in the courtroom so that action is all off-screen and reported indirectly.

This made everything feel more credible to me. I don’t see courtrooms as dramatic places. Things move slowly and there’s little room for theatre.

I won’t share the ending. I found it credible. It was also absolutely not how you end a genre murder mystery or a thriller.

At the end of the book, I found myself satisfied and a little exhausted. I felt as if I witnessed something real and found myself trying to define what that ‘real’ thing was.

I found my answer not by revisiting the plot twists but by considering the title: ‘I Have Some Questions For You’. The recurring questions in the novel are: How did I let this happen? and How did I not see this?

What I took away from the book was that our lives are only narratives when we make them, or let other people make them, so.  We become blind when we let that narrative sit unchallenged. We need to learn to ask questions that enable us to reassess, reject, reaffirm or reshape our narrative. We need to understand that our answers are all temporary and imperfect and need to change over time.

---