The first time I heard Erika Krouse speak at a Reading Den, she described a personal phenomenon as the basis for her 2022 book, Tell Me Everything—which received enough accolades to warrant a paragraph; for starters, it was the winner of the 2023 Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime, the Colorado Book Award for Creative Nonfiction, the Housatonic Book Award for Nonfiction, and was an NYT Editor’s Choice.
“Erika Krouse has one of those faces. ‘I don’t know why I’m telling you this,’ people say, spilling confessions.” This led Krouse to accept a role as a private investigator in the fall of 2022, cracking open an investigation that “grows into a national scandal and a historic civil rights case that revolutionizes Title IX law.”
So I had to ask, how does that experience, that skillset, come into play in her latest, Save Me, Stranger?
EK: Save Me, Stranger is twelve stories told from twelve different perspectives, featuring characters at hinge moments, all centering around the theme of rescue; sometimes a narrator is in a position to save someone else, or sometimes a narrator needs rescue. All the stories use first-person narration like each story is a different confession. I think my experience hearing people confess to me contributed to that choice—I wanted readers to feel like they were the only ones hearing that life story.
Is there any specific confession that inspired you to write this book of stories?
EK: I wrote the first story for this book in 2013 after a friend and writing compatriot took his own life. We were scheduled to meet the following day. I was haunted by a feeling of guilt and remorse like perhaps I could have done something to nudge the course of events so all his family and friends didn’t have to go through such devastation. That feeling was an overinflation of my influence on my friend (or fate in general), but I felt it just the same.
So I wrote that first story, which became the title story, as a way to deal with my guilt. I never thought it would be a book. But then I got obsessed with the question: is it possible for one person to save another? And what do we owe each other? Where are the boundaries between us?
Will readers find those themes throughout their experience of reading Save Me, Stranger?
EK: All the characters are different: a runaway fights for her future while driving an ice-cream truck in Omaha gang territory; a cleaning woman investigates the teenager who died in her stead; a terminal patient in Alaska becomes a professional euthanizer. The stories take place all over the globe, from Siberia to Japan to Thailand to different places in the U.S. I liked to imagine these narrators would be telling their stories to, what Rebecca Makkai calls “the ear of the story.” Sometimes that “ear” became part of the story (like in the first one, “The Pole of Cold”); but most often not. I imagined them telling their stories on a train or their deathbed, or just talking to themselves because telling another person would be too dangerous.
Sometimes we take the art and privilege of storytelling for granted, but it serves an important purpose in our history—and modern life.
EK: I couldn’t have predicted the outcome of this last election when I began writing these stories in 2013, but…this year is off to quite a start, with all the physical and political wildfires. Myself, I crave both escape right now and validation of the core-shaking emotions of this moment in time. I hope this book can provide both, allowing a reader to slip into other skins for a while; hopefully finding meaning in the experience.
And do you think there’s something the short story can offer specifically, outside of longer-form stories, like novels?
EK: Short story collections are the underdogs of the literary world since most published books are novels or memoirs. Short stories are economical, delivering a complete experience in a short space, and they’re inherently more experimental in that way.
Flatiron Books released Save Me, Stranger just last month, with lots of national attention. Adam Johnson called it “a dozen little masterpieces,” Ann Beattie said it is “remarkable,” and Louise Erdrich instructed readers to, “Read these stories with a buddy, because someone will have to scrape you off the floor.”
But we are lucky enough to have you right here in Colorado, so how can readers get their hands on a book and hear more about the stories?
EK: Here is a list of all the upcoming events–which includes a happy hour launch at Lighthouse, where I’ll be in conversation with Jenny Shank.
For more information about Save Me, Stranger and Krouse’s other notable works, visit her website and follow along on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.