An untold AIDS story in ‘Great Believers’
“No one wants to die before the end of the story,” says a character in Rebecca Makkai’s new novel, “The Great Believers.” Unfortunately, many of the people in Makkai’s book aren’t able to outrun death; they’re struck down too young, victims of a plague that was poorly understood at the time.
“The Great Believers” is a story of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. The novel follows Yale Tishman, a museum administrator who’s trying to acquire an art collection from an elderly woman, Nora, who worked as an artist’s model in 1920s Paris. Yale, who is gay, is also dealing with the loss of several of his friends to AIDS, the disease that is ravaging the gay community in Chicago. His story is intercut with chapters featuring his best friend, Fiona, who 30 years later, is still scarred by the loss of her friends and is trying to locate her long-estranged daughter in Paris.
Makkai comes to Los Angeles to discuss “The Great Believers” at How did the idea for a book about the AIDS crisis in the 1980s come to you?
I never actually had the idea to write a book about the AIDS crisis; I started off writing a completely different book. There’s a subplot [in “The Great Believers”] with all this stuff about the Paris art world of the 1920s, and that was originally the book. I was originally going to write a story about a woman who had been an artist’s model in 1920s Paris, about the end of her life, which I figured couldn’t be much past the 1980s. I wanted it to be about the ongoing conversations between her and this art collector or historian, who she was trying to convince that in this one painting, it was her in the picture. And my husband very sweetly and helpfully pointed out that that was kind of the plot of the movie “Titanic.” That kind of threw me off a little bit but in a helpful way.
Meanwhile, I started to get really interested in this art guy, and I started thinking that maybe the AIDS epidemic was a part of this book. The first thing that I actually sat down and wrote was a letter — it’s not in the novel but a letter from the woman who became Nora to the guy who became Yale, talking about the devastation of Paris after World War I, where everyone she knew and loved had been together in this chosen family, this artistic mecca, and coming back there and everyone was gone or damaged or missing or dead. Eventually, the way it shifted for me, it really became about the AIDS epidemic. Partly my research took me there, partly I was just following the story where it wanted to go. A lot of novels that have to do with the AIDS crisis seem to take place in New York and San Francisco. How did you decide to set your book in Chicago?
I’ve lived here basically my whole life; I love writing about Chicago. What was really interesting for me is that as I set out to do my research, there was shockingly little about how AIDS affected Chicago, which was and is the third-biggest city in the U.S. It hit quite hard here and in a very concentrated area, Boystown. Once in a while, they’ll talk about this 1990 ACT UP demonstration that I wrote about in the book.The fiction, nonfiction, documentaries, film, the theater, are not only not about cities like Chicago, they’re neglecting cities like Milwaukee and Baltimore, places that had their own completely idiosyncratic stories and reactions. It was alarming to me that there isn’t more. I was thinking there would be at least one big nonfiction book about AIDS in Chicago; if there is, I have not found it, and I’ve been searching for five years and asking people who would know.
I have not written that book, and someone needs to, someone with better nonfiction chops than me. But in some ways, it was a blessing in disguise, because it forced me out from behind my desk and it made me do a lot of legwork for my research. I did a ton of primary source research, looking back at gay weeklies like the Windy City Times, and also in-person interviews with doctors, nurses, survivors, activists, lawyers and journalists and basically anyone who would talk to me. And I think it was ultimately much
better for my book. Talking to sur vivors of the epidemic in the ’80s — those must have been incredibly emotional conversations.
It was difficult in several ways. First of all, there was quite a hunt to find certain kinds of people. I have gay friends, but they tend to be around my age, and I have a few friends who are HIV-positive, but it didn’t necessarily feel like I could approach them right off the bat. Really, the unicorn was the people who had been in Chicago in the early ’80s, out, and in Boystown, and maybe HIV-positive since that time. It was very hard to find people who have lived that long with HIV, but I did end up finding a couple. A lot of that process was having someone introduce me to someone else, interviewing that person, explaining my project, then me asking them who should I talk to next, and then sending me to their friends, and so on.
I eventually really lucked out in one way: I had a writer friend who introduced me to the two doctors who started the AIDS unit at Illinois Masonic Hospital. They were wonderful, and introduced me to all these other people who’d been affiliated with AIDS care at that time. I was honored that people were willing to talk to me about, first of all, incredibly personal stuff, in some cases. People were talking to me about their sex lives, after having known me for five minutes, and inviting me, in many cases, into their homes, because they didn’t want to talk about this stuff in Starbucks. And even more so, I was completely honored when they were talking about people they had lost. I have to say, I heard a lot of the first half of stories, and then people couldn’t continue. Which is fine. I didn’t need to hear the endings of the stories. It was the details, the little things that I couldn’t have gotten from a book; it was the emotional osmosis of putting myself in those people’s shoes, hearing stories, seeing pictures, things that allowed me to write with more conviction and more authenticity, and I felt like I could put myself there emotionally. I think we might be close to the same age; I would have been about 7 in 1985. Do you remember the first time you heard about the AIDS crisis?
I don’t remember a specific first time. We’re the same age, so I think you’ll understand how completely huge it seemed, and was, although I think not all adults saw it the same way. You’re a kid, and you see this on TV, and you haven’t lived through other crises. And you don’t have, hopefully, and I don’t think I did, the callous prejudice of “That’s happening over there, to those people” that adults do, even if they like those people, but it’s over there. Because you’re a kid, you’re porous.
I remember it being absolutely everywhere. I remember kids joking about it at school in really awful ways, but I also remember it being all over the news. If you stayed home sick from school and you watched “Donahue” or something, it was right there. In my early childhood, it wasn’t particularly personal. My parents lost a colleague, but it wasn’t anyone I knew. I grew up in the suburbs, but by the time I was a teenager, I was hanging out in the city, and would go to Boystown with my friends in the early to mid-’90s, just because that was the cool place to go. And it was around. You’d notice. You’d see people sitting on the street with a cardboard sign that said “I’m dying of AIDS, I need money.” And you’d get to high school in the early ’90s, and all of sex ed is all HIV, all the time. Then it starts to come into the popular culture with movies, famous people start dying, people on your radar. I remember Howard Ashman, the Disney lyricist, dying,and the in-memoriam montages at the Tonys and the Oscars. So it’s distant, but if you are a kid, your worldview is formed around that crisis. Your novel really strikes me as an act of remembrance. Do you think young people today might not realize how bad the AIDS crisis was in the ’80s?
I think they don’t at all. I didn’t realize that until I was writing this. It’s not that I’ve seen that first hand, but so many people have told me stories about talking to younger people who have been shocked to learn how many friends someone lost, for instance.
I think the corollary to that, though, is that Americans do not understand that there are still a million people dying of AIDS every year. Because many of the deaths are in Africa, it feels like it’s out of sight, out of mind. That’s horrifying, and it’s horrifying that Trump is pulling out of a lot of the ways we were helping internationally. There’s always been ignorance around this disease. There was profound ignorance on so many levels in the ’80s and the early ’90s that we in some ways emerged from, but I think that ignorance has been passed on. I think that definitely infuses our lack of thinking about the global issue of AIDS.