The job is the hustle - making things happen for yourself.

She loves it, and a lot of authors don’t. Keeping your name in the world is important for a writer, but that’s not just why she does it. “She is like the ultimate literary citizen. “Anyone who writes for a living should look at Rebecca and take notes,” said Rebecca George, co-owner of Volumes. It navigates Michigan Avenue picket lines and missing daughters and cults and lost generations and victims and hospitals and the art world and how communities endure.Īsk Makkai about her ubiquity, and she replies, “It’s karmic for one thing,” then goes on a tangent and never returns to the second thing. It ends in Paris, several decades and many victims later. It visits Door County, Wis., and the Art Institute of Chicago it finds a place for World War I Europe circa 1918 and the secluded nooks of Belmont Harbor circa 1982 (“a gay space hidden from the city but wide open to the vast expanse of Lake Michigan”). The book begins in 1985 at a Lincoln Park memorial for a gay man whose family disowned him, only to reclaim him at the last moment, “insisting he die in the suburbs in an ill-equipped hospital with nice wallpaper” it finds a city where initial survivors, not yet seeing the reach of AIDS, don’t know whether to host rowdy house parties in honor of the dead or somber, hands-folded funeral services. Whereas the story of the disease in the United States tends to be a New York or San Francisco tragedy, here it is a “slow-motion tsunami from both coasts,” a pool of water collecting at Midwestern ankles that climbs so quietly many are surprised to find themselves drowning. “The Great Believers,” the new novel by Rebecca Makkai, describes the AIDS epidemic in Chicago in the 1980s and its impact on the gay community.

The great believers by rebecca makkai