Erika Krouse

writer and editor

Official website for Erika Krouse, author of Contenders and Come Up and See Me Sometime.

For Book Clubs, Teachers, and Reading Groups

Thank you for considering my book(s) for your book club, group, or class! Whenever I’m available, I’m happy to do a free 30-ish minute Zoom visit with your book club or class to meet you all and answer any questions. Below are Book Club Guides for my two most recent books: Save Me, Stranger and Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation (and if you’re interested in older books, that’s an option, too). Please feel free to contact me directly for any book club needs/desires, or you can contact Flatiron’s publicist—more info on my Contact page.

Save Me, Stranger reading group guide

From the coldest town on earth to a sex shop in Bangkok to a haunted bed-and-breakfast in the Rockies, we meet characters at hinge moments. A runaway fights for her future while driving an ice-cream truck in gang territory; a cleaning woman investigates the teenager who died in her stead; a terminal patient in Alaska discovers new life in helping others die. This collection explores the borderlands between humor and hurt, community and self, and hope and despair, redefining what it means to survive. Starred reviews from ✶Kirkus and ✶Booklist. “Read these stories with a buddy, because someone will have to scrape you off the floor.” —Louise Erdrich, author of The Sentence and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award

Here’s the text from Flatiron Books' reading guide:

Welcome to the Reading Group Guide for Save Me, Stranger. Please note: In order to provide reading groups with the most informed and thought-provoking questions possible, it is sometimes necessary to reveal important aspects of the plot of the stories, as well as the endings. If you have not finished reading Save Me, Stranger, we respectfully suggest that you wait before reviewing this guide.

  1. What is the significance of the title, Save Me, Stranger? Discuss some moments when the title especially resonates, and how its meaning changes across the collection.

  2. Do you have a favorite short story in the collection? Why does that one speak to you?

  3. Vera in “The Pole of Cold” is the young mayor of the coldest town on earth, a place her new friend Theo calls “the edge of existence.” Is Vera living or merely surviving? Do you think she should leave or remain tied to her rough and isolated life?

  4. In “The Piano,” Leron is trying to sell a desecrated Steinway to a lapsed musical prodigy. What has music cost them, and what has it given them? Can this piano do what his customer wants it to do—“recapture wasted time”? What would that mean?

  5. A teenage runaway (nicknamed “Vanilla”) drives an ice cream truck through Omaha ganglands in “North of Dodge” but discovers, “I couldn’t leave Omaha if I tried.” What are her mixed feelings about her new home? How does her friendship with two neglected kids force her to change, for better or worse?

  6. In “Eat My Moose,” Colum and Bonnie become euthanizers to cosmically ward off their own deaths. Is Bonnie correct in saying “The Devil is us,” or are they angels of mercy? Do you agree with their decision to assist in the suicides of strangers?

  7. In the title story, a young stranger named Vance saves the narrator, and his courage costs him his life. Do you think he made the right choice or a misguided one? What do you make of the narrator’s quest to track down Vance’s love interest? What does this story suggest about what we owe one another?

  8. Is Elsa’s father in “When in Bangkok” worth saving? How will Elsa save herself?

  9. “The Standing Man” features the relationship between Satō, a Tokyo ramen shop worker, and an American expat trying to discover the secret to Satō’s perfect memory. What do you think Satō means when he says, “You’re after the wrong secret”?

  10. In “Jude,” why is Basia obsessed with her grandmother? Why does she say, “Next to my grandmother’s story, how could mine mean anything?” Do you agree?

  11. The narrator in “Fear Me as You Fear God” flees her husband and hides in a mountain B&B that turns out to be haunted. What is her relationship with the ghost?

  12. In the same story, why does the narrator fear “nothing, nobody, no God, wondering if God now feared me”? How do you interpret the ending of the story? Do you think she made the right decision?

  13. What does Arlon’s wife mean when she says, “I feel like I could stand here and talk with you all night. And it would be the worst night of my life,” in the story with a similar name?

  14. Do you believe Arlon’s encounter with the stranger in the store will help him change? Why or why not?

  15. Katie is a pregnant teenager, trying to figure out her options, as she tests for her scuba certification in “The Blue Hole.” When Katie says the baby’s father “could just walk away, but I had to choose between eternal damnation or a sentence of eighteen years to life,” what does that mean to you?

  16. In the final story, “Wounds of the Heart and Great Vessels,” Rachel recounts a legend where a group of men watch their empress drown rather than rescue her because “in whatever culture this was, if you save someone’s life, you’re responsible for that life forever.” Do you agree? Do the strangers in this collection save each other out of responsibility? If not, why are they saving each other?

Here’s the text from Flatiron Books' reading guide:

Welcome to the Reading Group Guide for Tell Me Everything. Please note: In order to provide reading groups with the most informed and thought-provoking questions possible, it is necessary to occasionally reveal spoilers. If you have not finished reading Tell Me Everything, we respectfully suggest that you may want to wait before reviewing this guide.

  1. Tell Me Everything opens with these lines: “I became a private investigator because of my face. It’s an ordinary-looking face, but if I ask, ‘How are you?’ sometimes people start crying.” In what ways do you think these lines set the tone for what’s to come? Why do you think Erika has this experience? How does her life change when she gets a broken nose and her face is no longer the same?

  2. When Grayson first approaches Erika with this case, she nearly turns it down because she “didn’t protect women, or make justice happen . . . I was nobody. Unqualified, and too qualified. I understood rape victims and I understood rapists, and I didn’t want to understand either, ever again.” Why do you think she felt this way? And despite feeling this way, why do you think she ultimately agreed to work the case?

  3. After buying Daisy lunch in hopes of getting her to agree to testify in court, Grayson observes how Daisy acted toward Erika and asks, “You know Daisy thinks she’s your friend, right?” Erika often worries that she gets too intimate with her subjects and earns their trust only to use them to further the case. What are some of the moral ambiguities of her work, specifically regarding her relationship with Daisy?

  4. Erika describes Grayson as someone “who was going to make lemonade from lemons because he wanted lemonade. If there were no lemons he’d squeeze whatever he could find—a steak, a stick, a clod of dirt. And it would taste the way he wanted it to.” How would you describe Erika and Grayson’s relationship? How are their approaches to the case similar? How are they different?

  5. In martial arts, Erika describes her approach to winning as “the nail hammers the hammer with tiny, relentless strokes.” What do you make of this line? How does this same mentality reflect in her PI work?

  6. During the investigation, one of the football players tells Erika, “The stuff that happens here, well, that happens everywhere. Everywhere. It’s just the general culture of recruiting trips.” What general culture is he referring to, and in what ways do universities perpetuate it? What do you think should be done to effectively break the cycle?

  7. Reflecting on the investigation, Erika writes, “I couldn’t tell which we were dealing with, crimes that created a culture, or a culture that created a crime.” Discuss this passage. Based on your lived experience, do you have an opinion either way?

  8. Reflecting on the condition of the building where she earned her master’s degree in English literature, Erika writes, “It was clear what the university valued. What would they do to protect it?” How do these disparities on campus affect students and student life? What are the pros and cons of college sports, as argued in this book?

  9. Erika writes about how her mother would often remind her that she was not deserving of love and happiness. She reflects: “I did not understand love, although I had often felt it. I just didn’t know how it was supposed to work once you separated the feeling from itself and turned it into action, doing things together.” What do you think she means? As she continues to investigate the case, Erika feels a pressing need to face her mother and the pain she endured as a child so that she can better understand her work and herself. Why do you think she feels this way?

  10. How does Erika’s complicated relationship with her mother and siblings differ from the one she has with JD? How does she struggle in her marriage, and how do she and JD support each other?

  11. Erika reflects on the difficulty she felt in speaking out against her own abuser and writes, “I had been taught to keep it to myself.” How does society enable or even promote the silencing of women? What “hidden rules” are women supposed to follow? How do these rules differ for men?

  12. While sparring at the Brazilian jiu-jitsu academy, Ernie breaks Erika’s nose. Instead of calling to apologize to her, he calls to apologize to JD. Why do you think he does that? How do you perceive Erika’s gender affecting her experience in martial arts and as a PI?

  13. When Riley explains to Erika why she decided to continue working as a trainer after getting raped by a player, she says, “I didn’t want the rape and the team to have control over my life and my future. I didn’t run away. I stayed. At first I felt pretty vulnerable. But now it’s empowering.” What do you think she means? Do you sympathize?

  14. When the case implodes and gets dismissed by a federal judge, Erika begins to lose her sense of purpose. She writes, “Justice wasn’t blind—it was random. I felt sickened by the lost case, like I had the flu.” Given how affected Erika was by this case, do you think she should have taken it on in the first place? What do you see as the positive and negative consequences of her work as a PI?

  15. Erika contemplates what freedom actually is and reflects on what JD told her: “But JD was right—freedom comes from losing our illusions. It’s not giving up to see clearly ahead of you. Some things we can’t have, even if we try our whole lives.” What does she mean? Do you think Erika finds her freedom, and if so, how?

Support your local independent bookstores!