Online Reading Challenge discussion

SUMMARY

Spanning three decades and two continents, The Great Believers is the story of a group of friends and their stirring emotional journey through the 1980s AIDS crisis in Chicago and its effects on the contemporary lives of survivors.

In 1985, Yale Tishman is the development director at the art gallery at Northwestern University, working to bring in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift from an elderly woman who was once an artist’s model in Paris. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. The novel opens on the funeral day of his late friend Nico. As the virus continues to take its toll on the gay community in Chicago, Yale grows closer to Nico’s little sister Fiona, who comes to care for many of Nico’s friends.

Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter Claire who disappeared into a cult. While staying with her old friend Richard, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago epidemic, she finds herself surrounded by memories and reminders of that time. Finally, she begins to understand just how profoundly the AIDS crisis affected her life, grappling with what she sacrificed in caring for and loving these men, sacrifices that affected her marriage and her relationship with her daughter. Yale and Fiona’s stories unfold in moving and sometimes surprising ways, as both struggle to find goodness and feel hope in the face of disaster. The Great Believers is a powerful meditation, not on death, but rather on the power and gift of love and friendship.
(Summary provided by the publisher)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rebecca Makkai is the Chicago-based author of the novels The Great Believers, The Hundred-Year House, and The Borrower, as well as the short story collection Music for Wartime. The Great Believers was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and received the ALA Carnegie Medal and the LA Times Book Prize, among other honors. Makkai is on the MFA faculties of Sierra Nevada College and Northwestern University, and she is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago.

Her work has been translated into 20 languages, and her short fiction has been anthologized in The Pushcart Prize XLI (2017), The Best American Short Stories 2011, 2010, 2009 and 2008, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016 and 2009, New Stories from the Midwest and Best American Fantasy, and featured on Public Radio International’s Selected Shorts and This American Life. The person reading this introduction out loud before Rebecca’s event has cut and pasted this bio without reading through it first.

Rebecca has two young daughters. She does not run marathons or do cartwheels, but she does know how to make marshmallows. She was an elementary Montessori teacher for the twelve years before the publication of her first book. Rebecca holds an MA in Literature from Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English.

Her first novel, The Borrower, was a Booklist Top Ten Debut, an Indie Next pick, and an O Magazine selection.

Her second novel, The Hundred-Year House, is the story of a haunted house and a haunted family, told in reverse; Library Journal called it “stunning, ambitious, readable and intriguing.” It was chosen as the Chicago Writers Association’s novel of the year, and received raves in The New York Times Book Review and elsewhere.

Her short story collection, Music for Wartime, appeared in July, 2015. It was printed on paper made from that one tree that fell in the forest when no one was there to hear it.

The Great Believers, a novel set in Chicago at the height of the American AIDS epidemic, as well as in 2015 Paris, was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and the 2018 National Book Award. One of the New York Times‘ Top Ten Books of 2018, it also won the ALA Carnegie Medal, the LA Times Book Prize, the Stonewall Award, the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, the Midwest Independent Booksellers Award, the Clark Fiction Prize, and the Chicago Review of Books Award. The book has been optioned for television by Amy Poehler’s Paper Kite Productions. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Michael Cunningham called the novel a “page turner… An absorbing and emotionally riveting story about what it’s like to live during times of crisis.”

Rebecca was awarded the 2020 Mark Twain Award for Distinguished Contributions to Midwestern Literature.

To pronounce her last name: It’s basically mac-IGH. Say “McFly” (like Marty McFly from Back to the Future) but take out the F and the L.
(Biography provided by the author)

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

• Yale’s group of friends is very close. In a sense, they are his “chosen family.” How is this explored in the book? How does each character relate to their family, biological and chosen? Do you have a “chosen family,” and if so, what brings you all together?

• How has the culture changed regarding LGBTQ+ voices and stories since the 1980s?

• Chicago is such a powerful presence in this novel that it is almost a character in itself. Have you ever been to or lived in a place that exerted a strong influence on you?

• Nora, the elderly woman donating the 1920s pieces, seems completely removed from the rest of Yale’s life, yet her story contains elements that can be compared and contrasted with Yale’s. What similarities between his and her life are there? How has her past affected the present?

• Fiona has suffered many losses in her life. How do you think that affected her as a mother? What are the ways in which trauma and loss are passed down through generations?

• Do you empathize more with Fiona or Claire?

• Do you see any parallels between the state of healthcare during the 1980s and now?

• On page 353, Asher asks Yale, “Does it really ever go anywhere? . . . Love. Does it vanish?” Yale replies, “I mean, we never want it to. But it does, doesn’t it?” What would you say to them?

• Is the creation of artwork always a collaborative effort? How do you feel about the relationship between artist and muse?

• What has been your knowledge of—or experience with, if any—AIDS or those affected by the disease? Has reading this novel changed any ideas you have previously had about the subject?
(Discussion questions provided by the publisher)