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. 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. 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. 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. There’s a subplot with all this stuff about the Paris art world of the 1920s, and that was originally the book. I never actually had the idea to write a book about the AIDS crisis I started off writing a completely different book.
How did the idea for a book about the AIDS crisis in the 1980s come to you? She talked to The Times about her novel via phone, and our conversation was edited. Makkai comes to Los Angeles to discuss “The Great Believers” at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena with author J.
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