LEGENDARY LOCAL

As Lake Blurr native and Pulitzer-nominated novelist Rebecca Makkai prepares to join an illustrious list of Local Legends, we look back at a cover feature we published nearly nine years ago to catch up on what’s new and next for the author.

ONE CHILLY FALL DAY IN late 2017, myself and Lake Forest photographer Kerri Sherman spent an afternoon with up-and-coming author Rebecca Makkai for a feature story about her work and life growing up in Lake Bluff. Her 2011 novel The Borrower had already been translated into eight languages and her stories had been widely anthologized but there was another project that was top of mind—a novel with an auspicious title, The Great Believers.

“This is a breakthrough for me in a lot of ways,” said Makkai, who was in the process of choosing the book cover when we met. “Ultimately, I feel this is a much bigger book than my previous ones, and I think the few people who have read it agree.”

Her instincts were spot on.

When The Great Believers was published by Viking/Penguin in June 2018, it skyrocketed to the top of every literary list. In addition to being named a New York Times Top 10 Book of 2018, the novel about the AIDS crisis in 1980 Chicago won a book prize at the Los Angeles Times and an ALA Carnegie Medal. The Great Believers—which followed her novel, The One-Hundred Year House, in 2015—also won the Stonewall Book Award and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

To say that Makkai’s life has changed since we last featured her is an understatement.

As she prepares to accept the History Center of Lake Forest-Lake Bluff’s prestigious Local Legend award on November 14, we reached out to the busy author to find out what she’s working on and what the honor means to her.

Needless to say, your hunch that it was going to be your big “breakthrough” was accurate. What has the success of that book and your next novel, the New York Times bestseller I Have Some Questions For You, meant for your writing career?

It’s funny, COVID hit when we were still in the paperback year for that book (the second year it was out), and it found the bulk of its readers that summer and over the next year or two. Of course I wasn’t out on the road while this was happening, so it was all theoretical to me, plus there was just the chaos of COVID.

Then when I Have Some Questions for You came out in early 2023, I went on the road and was shocked to find that everything was different. Like most writers, I had struggled to fill the reading area at a small bookstore before, but now I was doing events in theaters that were sold out. People hadn’t even read the new novel yet at first, but they were there to talk about The Great Believers, and I just wasn’t prepared for the reality of it. I knew the numbers, but still it was like—oh, wow, what happened? There was also a lot of attention abroad for both of those novels.

My previous three books had been translated into quite a few languages, but nothing had massively taken off. Now it turns out I’m somehow more famous in Poland than in the U.S. I’ve done a lot of international touring in the past few years, and it’s meant so much to get to know readers in Spain or Australia or Italy.

During that interview, we in essence captured a day in the life of an already successful writer working on her next novel while teaching, serving on the Ragdale board, and raising two young daughters. Nine years and many accolades later, what does an average day look like for you? What are you working on and what have the last nine years taught you about fame and finding balance?

It looks about the same, except that my kids are now in high school and college, but I’m basically just as busy. Eight years ago, I was busy because I was constantly hustling—figuring out ways to get to literary festivals by cashing in airline miles and sleeping on someone’s couch.

Now it’s more that people want or need things from me, or there are amazing invitations (a literary festival in Bali, a conference in Kauai, interviewing Margaret Atwood at the Art Institute) that are hard to turn down. I didn’t have a healthy balance before, and I don’t have one now. I’m on a triple editing deadline at the moment: Edits on my new novel (which will be out in the fall of 2027) are due in about a week; edits on a novella I wrote for a French travel publisher—a crime caper about Chicago—are due in two weeks; and edits for a short story are due somewhere in between.

And I have to get a kid to college in 12 days. Tomorrow I have a board meeting for Luminarts, a wonderful Chicago arts nonprofit. This past week was our conference and festival for StoryStudio, the literary arts organization where I’m Artistic Director, so I was on the north side all week and then at the Newberry Library all weekend for that. I took my younger kid to Target today for notebooks and protein bars. I need to get to the chiropractor, but that’s the kind of thing that gets sacrificed.

When you receive the History Center of Lake Forest-Lake Bluff’s Local Legend award next month, you join the likes of baseball legend Ryne Sandberg, Grammy-winning musician Richard Marx, world-famous architect Adrian Smith, and great American astronaut Jim Lovell. What does this award mean to you personally and professionally?

First of all, I feel like those four and I would make an amazing band. Richard Marx can of course be the lead singer.

But also: Of course this is a huge honor. I grew up in Lake Bluff, and I’ve lived most of my adult life in Lake Forest. Since my literary life is more centered in Chicago and New York, it can actually feel like no one up here knows me in that way, like I’m one person at home and another person in the city.

I’m remembering that a while back, right after everything happened with The Great Believers, one of my kids’ friends was so excited and impressed because she saw me on some random flier for something I was doing at the Lake Forest Library.

It was actually really lovely—this feeling that things are realer when they happen closer to home. Like I said, all the stuff that happens out there in the world can feel quite theoretical. There’s something different about being recognized in the places you’ve always known.

Local Legends 2026 Honoring Rebecca Makkai will take place from 4 to 6 p.m. on Saturday, November 14, with an interview by WGN Morning News Anchor, Larry Potash at the History Center of Lake Forest Lake Bluff. For more information, visit lflbhistory.org/event/local-legends-2026-honoring-rebecca-makkai.