Discriminative question answering models can overfit to superficial biases in datasets, because their loss function saturates when any clue makes the answer likely. We introduce generative models of the joint distribution of questions and answers, which are trained to explain the whole question, not just to answer it.Our question answering (QA) model is implemented by learning a prior over answers, and a conditional language model to generate the question given the answer—allowing scalable and interpretable many-hop reasoning as the question is generated word-by-word. Our model achieves competitive performance with specialised discriminative models on the SQUAD and CLEVR benchmarks, indicating that it is a more general architecture for language understanding and reasoning than previous work. The model greatly improves generalisation both from biased training data and to adversarial testing data, achieving a new state-of-the-art on ADVERSARIAL SQUAD. We will release our code.