‘It’ll all be okay’
For one glorious day, author Rebecca Makkai became our Twitter mom
On Sunday afternoon, the first day of March, with coronavirus fears swirling and presidential politics raging and stock markets reeling from the previous week, author Rebecca Makkai hopped on Twitter and did something remarkable.
She made it kind.
“Hey,” the Chicago-based novelist (“The Great Believers,” “The Hundred-Year House”) wrote, “if anyone needs a mom right now to tell them it’ll all be okay:
It’ll all be okay.”
Some of her 19,700 followers chimed in with gratitude: “I just lost mine two weeks ago today, so I’m here for this.” “Today is the 12th anniversary of my mother’s death. I needed to hear this. Thank you.”
Makkai followed with another tweet: “Genuine offer: Respond to this with what you’re worried about (personal, political, global, existential) and I’ll tell you why you’re going to be okay.”
And in rolled the worries. “Worried I’m not strong enough to be what a world like this needs me to be.”
“Your muscles get strong through resistance training,” Makkai replied, “and your soul gets strong through resistance training.”
Wrote another: “My 90year-old Dad is determined for us to go to Germany in April for the 75th anniversary of his liberation from Buchenwald and of course I’m terrified about his fragile health on such an arduous trip. Not exactly the best of times.”
“Oh wow!!!” Makkai replied. “I get why you’re worried, but it might bring him health and peace in ways you couldn’t imagine.”
“My father repatriated to Hungary at 80 and died there this winter,” Makkai wrote in a second tweet. “I think he’d have had better health care in the US, but it was so important to him to go back.”
Another worry: “How is my Black, autistic, son going to survive this culture!”
“The world is better for having him in it,” Makkai replied. “And you’re going to protect him and teach people what they need to know.”
I called Makkai, 41. I wanted to know what inspired her to channel her inner mom on behalf of a bunch of strangers. (She’s also an actual mom to a 9and 12-year-old.)
“There’s panic going on about so many things right now, and I could feel people taking to Twitter almost in an attempt to calm themselves down,” she said. “But what was coming back at them was just more panic.”
She drew on her 12 years as an elementary school teacher, her lifetime of quieting her own anxiety, and the example her own mother set. And then she started soothing.
“My mom grew up during the Depression and during World War II and she is this incredibly reassuring presence for me,” Makkai said. “She sometimes drives me crazy doing this, but she’s 100%, always, without fail saying, ‘You’re going to be fine. You’re amazing.’ And that becomes the voice you internalize.”
Makkai’s not naive. She knows the fears people brought to her — coronavirus, climate change, racial persecution — are real risks and can’t be explained away by positive thinking.
But she also believes in the power of community to look at those fears straight on and collectively and with an eye toward solutions.
“One person I actually know in real life wrote that his family hadn’t let him come home since he came out,” Makkai told me. “Another guy an hour earlier wrote about how he lost his job and didn’t know what to do with himself, and I asked him what he would be doing if he could do whatever he wanted. He wanted to start a podcast for people who’d just come out of the closet, and I ended up introducing them in this thread.”
We forget sometimes, Makkai said, that we can turn to each other when we feel panicked.
“We all have, evolutionarily, these communal survival tactics — altruism and loyalty,” she said. “Especially online, we can forget that. You’re sort of isolated, shouting your own thoughts into the wind and forgetting this is a place where, theoretically, we can come together as humans too.”
A worry: “Worried about what kind of world we’re leaving for our grandchildren.”
Makkai’s answer: “I’m more focused on what kind of grandchildren we’re leaving the world. I might have a biased sample (I tend to meet young writers) but this new generation is AMAZING.”
“Fundamentally,”
Makkai told me, “my job as a writer is to acknowledge people’s fears about the world and then show them a way through.”
Her last novel, “The Great Believers,” is about the AIDS crisis in 1980s Chicago. It was a 2019 Pulitzer Prize finalist in fiction.
“I’m not writing how-to books; I’m writing novels,” she said. “But it’s acknowledging and digging into the turmoil of the world and deciding how we come together and survive. It’s giving people something they didn’t have before.”
Some hope. A community. An inner voice that reminds you to believe in your own power and beauty, even in the face of tremendous hardship. What a lovely definition of mothering.
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