Jim Krusoe

Jim Krusoe is the author of the novels Erased, Girl Factory, and Iceland. His stories and poems have appeared in the Antioch Review, Bomb, the Chicago Review, the Denver Quarterly, the American Poetry Review, and other publications. He teaches at Santa Monica College and lives in Los Angeles.

From a Q & A at the Tin House blog about Krusoe's new novel, Toward You.

Meg Storey: Unlike the first two books in this trilogy, which have one male narrator, Toward You’s narration alternates between a man and a young girl. Why did you decide to vary the narration in the last book?

Jim Krusoe: I started this book with high hopes for my narrator, Bob, but after a couple of drafts, became impatient with his poor attitude, considering the fact that he’d done a terrible thing and seemed barely sorry. So almost in revenge, I began trying to discover his victim’s side of the story, in part to remind the reader not to forget her, in part not to let Bob off the hook. The more I wrote the more I began to identify with Dee Dee and her situation of wanting to escape a place she didn’t want to be in (death). In the end, it turned out to be her story I was writing.

MS: How did you approach writing from a young girl’s (which you’re obviously not) point of view?

JK: Dee Dee c’est moi. We had the same goal: to figure out a way, while still staying true to the rules of the universe of St. Nils, to spring her out of heaven. And while I tried to keep her sounding eight years old, at times she sounds grown-up because one of the rules of the book’s universe is that all dead people get a “power-up,” so they can communicate on equal terms with each other (dogs get one, as well).

But actually all these...[read on]

Read reviews and excerpts from Toward You, and learn more about the novel at the publisher's website.

The Page 69 Test: Girl Factory.

The Page 69 Test: Erased.

The Page 69 Test: Toward You.

Writers Read: Jim Krusoe.

--Marshal Zeringue