The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai: a book review and discussion questions

The Great Believers, the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Rebecca Makkai, is the story of a group of mostly male gay friends living in 1985 Chicago during the rapid growth of the AIDS epidemic. The novel follows Yale and his friend Fiona from those first years of the epidemic to the present day and alternates between their points of view, sometimes following Yale in 1980s Chicago and sometimes Fiona in 2015 as she travels to Paris to look for her estranged daughter. The moving story shows how AIDS takes Yale’s and Fiona’s friends, relatives, and lovers one by one, eventually coming closer and closer to Yale himself. Again and again, the characters in the novel are all called upon to show up for each other as much as they are challenged to forgive each other for however they might have ended up infected with HIV. The result is a heart-wrenching portrayal of the power, necessity, and beauty of friendship during times of crisis.

I think the theme of friendship, and how beautifully Makkai captures it, is why this book resonated deeply with me. I read it shortly after the worst part of the covid-19 pandemic, which was a time that helped consolidate my group of closest friends. With true humility for how lucky we were, the eight of us often remark that one of the gifts of the pandemic was how close we became, partly because we could only interact with each other—our chosen “bubble”—and partly because hardship brings out the best (and worst) in people, so we got to know each other very well. Three years later, this is the community that supports me still.

It sounds clichéd, but also, it’s true: friendships can become family. Chosen family. As Esther Perel recently wrote in one of her newsletters, during the AIDS epidemic it was often friends who accompanied the sick and dying because the stigma of the disease usually alienated those with it from other support systems, including the family. Perel writes, “It was friends who negotiated on your behalf with the hospital and a legal system that didn’t recognize you. It was friends who planned what would happen to your art, your belongings, and your body. Friends buried friends. Parents discovered their kids were gay after they died.” The Great Believers portrays this vividly and precisely. And what’s important to remember is not that friendship necessarily comes first, and then supports us during a crisis. In a true representation of real life, the book shows that friendship can grow out of a crisis. Our social ties are simultaneously challenged and renegotiated during the worse moments of our life, and the ones that survive are the ones that we will carry beyond the present crisis and into the next. And so on, on repeat, for life.

We might know instinctively that social ties are important, but in the last few years, more and more research has shown statistical evidence of how social interaction is critical for mental and physical health. By now, dozens of studies have shown that people who feel connected to other people and to their community also feel happier, have fewer health problems, and live longer.

What was tragic about the AIDS and Covid-19 epidemics was that it threatened the very communities we depend on for survival. To prevent their spread, both diseases forced us to rethink and renegotiate how we interacted with people. When we understood that HIV spread through sex, it turned sex into a dangerous act. Think about that for a moment—it made one of the most intimate forms of human connection feel unsafe. Similarly, although perhaps less gravely, the more we understood that the SARS-CoV-2 spread through small airborne particles that we emit when we cough, speak, and even just exhale, the more it felt like the basic act of speaking to another person in a shared space was potentially fatal. How could we sustain relationships during this time when interaction itself was the mechanism the virus used to spread? It’s no wonder there were moments while reading The Great Believers where I almost forgot it was about AIDS and not Covid-19.

The Great Believers also depicts how AIDS, being a sexually transmitted disease, carried a heavy moral burden on top of the health threat. The epidemic coincided with the liberation of gay men, who were finally starting to cast of the shame of their sexual identity only to find themselves exposed to an unknown virus that spread through their community through sexual transmission and for which there was no cure and hardly any effective treatment back then. To get an AIDS diagnosis in the 1980s was practically a death sentence. When someone close to him becomes infected with HIV, Yale remarks how “This disease has magnified all our mistakes. Some stupid thing you did when you were nineteen, the one time you weren’t careful. And it turns out that was the most important day of your life.” And because AIDS was primarily killing gay men, who were still largely stigmatized in society, there was little political will to invest in treatments and research to learn more about it.

And so, for the gay community in the early 80s, the HIV epidemic became a moral judgment on being gay. Still today, despite how much we’ve learned about HIV and how effectively we’ve become at treating it, men who have sex with men are 26 times more likely than average to contract HIV. That is a heavy burden for a community to carry. This judgment placed even more pressure on the community and tested people’s relationships not only to each other, but to themselves. Like the character Teddy says at one point, “If you got it from sleeping with a thousand guys, then it’s a judgment on your promiscuity. If you got it from sleeping with one guy once, that’s almost worse, it’s like a judgment on all of us, like the act itself is the problem and not the number of times you did it. And if you got it because you thought you couldn’t, it’s a judgment on your hubris. And if you got it because you knew you could and you didn’t care, it’s a judgment on how much you hate yourself.” How can a community survive under the burden of such divisive judgment?

I remember similar moral judgments being passed during the Covid-19 pandemic and straining relationships. People who mingled not only with peers but also with parents, or grandparents, faced the moral weight of potentially spreading the virus to one of them, so many people who did not practice social distancing (especially among younger generations who were at lower risk of dying) were called careless and selfish. Anger blossomed amongst these differences in moral opinions. As Frank M. Snowden, Professor Emeritus of History at Yale put it in a March 2020 interview with The New Yorker, “Epidemics are a category of disease that seem to hold up the mirror to human beings as to who we really are…[They] obviously have everything to do with our relationship to our mortality, to death, to our lives…[and] they show the moral relationships that we have toward each other as people…” I’m guilty of passing moral judgment on people who socialized throughout the worst of the pandemic, and I still think social distancing was the responsible way to act, but perhaps I wish I’d been more compassionate.

There’s one of the novel’s lessons: in some ways, chosen family can feel more fragile than blood family because its continuity depends on, well, choice, instead of circumstance of birth. It’s much clearer in the context of the chosen family that it’s up to us to decide not just how to love one another, but how to forgive one another too. But that conscious effort—that intentionality—is ultimately what can make the bonds of chosen family the strongest of all bonds.

The Great Believers teaches us that pandemics have something to teach us about ourselves and our society. They tend to magnify the weaknesses in our society, our economy, our politics, and how we interact with each other. Where are your weaknesses, this book asks? Where do you need to be investing now so that you are more resilient later?

For me, the answer was: Community. As a somewhat introverted writer, the prospect of spending whole days on my own doesn’t sound too daunting. At least, not as much as it does for my more extroverted friends. But the last three years would have been unbearable without my community. Of course, I’ve belonged to communities before, but I’ve prioritized travel and adventure, moving to other cities when possible. Now, maintaining community is a value I uphold very intentionally.

It’s been a while since I’ve worn a face mask in public, but I’ve recently been reminded again of the vital importance of friendships. I’m going through a painful breakup right now, and in the very darkest moments of my grief, my friends have been my anchor. In a society that values romantic and family relationships as a proxy for personal success, this has been a reminder that friendships are equally valuable, equally important. Esther Perel again: “there is no hierarchy of ‘types’ of relationships.” What matters is community and if this novel offers any advice, it’s this: the only way to build resilience during times of crises is to build community, to have people in your life who you can ask to take you to the hospital and sit by your sickbed, to hold you in your pain. Just like the characters in The Great Believers, my friends and I have been called upon to show up for each other. And holy shit if it’s not been beautiful how we’ve shown up for each other. Is that not all that matters in the end?

The Great Believers is a novel in which sadness and grief are prominent. It left me in tears. The upside—because all great novels have a bittersweet upside—was that I put it down with an overwhelming gratitude for the people I love, and who love me.

So, go get yourself a copy of The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai (preferably at your local bookstore) and then join us for a discussion.