Call Me Home
Authors: Megan Kruse
Praise for Megan Kruse
Megan Kruse is a young writer of raw and fearless talent and
Call Me Home
showcases all she can do. She writes here of harrowing lives â of a family bent and broken by violence, where each person is desperately trying to somehow grow toward light and liberation. In the process, she offers a most unlikely tale of hardness and hustle, of grace and loss, of painful love and tough breaks and the unimaginable paths we must all eventually take toward survival.
ELIZABETH GILBERT
, Author of
Eat, Pray, Love
Call Me Home
is an uncommonly powerful debut novel. Megan Kruse writes with great heart and intelligence as she crafts a gripping story from the shards of a broken family.
JESS WALTER
, Author of
Beautiful Ruins
I've been a big fan of Megan Kruse for a long time, but
Call Me Home
left me astonished by her talent. Beautifully written, deeply felt and utterly compelling, this story of a desperate family separated and on the run is full of unforgettable scenes and richly imagined characters and heady suspense. It's so vivid, it feels like my own memory. I recommend it with all my heart.
DAN CHAON
, Author of
Await Your Reply
Megan Kruse has written a tough, unflinching and very loving story about an isolated family trying to scrape by and find a way, one way or another, to survive. I was deeply moved by the lives of her characters and scared for them right up to the end. Just a wonderful book, in every way.
BEVERLY LOWRY
, Author of
Crossed Over: A Murder, A Memoir
An urgent, beautiful book about love and its consequences, set against a backdrop of the unglamorized West. These characters will lodge themselves in your imagination, stick with you long after you're done reading. A fine and original first novel.
KEVIN CANTY
, Author of
Winslow in Love
I'm not sure how Megan Kruse did it. Her first novel manages to be a swift yet contemplative story of how a family can love each other fiercely even when every heart involved gets broken. Through its cast of characters, she is able to focus on what makes a human life shine with joy or ache with conflict. Her writing is cinematic â going from intense close-ups to beautiful sweeping wide shots.
Call Me Home
is a multi-layered and deeply felt wonder.
KEVIN SAMPSELL
, Author of
A Common Pornography
I can't stop thinking about this book. The tension and suspense had me hooked on page one, and I didn't want the novel to end. Megan Kruse writes unflinchingly about the terror of domestic violence and its haunting effects on a family. She writes with compassion and grace about how humans fail and betray each other, and also how we find and take care of each other.
Call Me Home
is a harrowing, beautiful, and tender novel about the meaning of home, loneliness, and the endurance of love. Kruse creates characters so deeply drawn and compelling, they will stay with you long after you close the book, as will the novel's memorable settings, especially Kruse's vivid portrait of a dark, mysterious, and wild Pacific Northwest. Megan Kruse is a talented and fearless writer, and the prose is just stunning.
Call Me Home
is a tremendous accomplishment.
CARTER SICKELS
, Author of
The Evening Hour
Megan Kruse is a stunning and inspiring new voice in American literature. Her beautiful debut,
Call Me Home
, proves that even as the violence of our lives invents us, a story can do something like save us. Read it and stick it in your heart.
ARIEL GORE
,
Author of The End of Eve
Copyright © 2014 Megan Kruse
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage-and-retrieval systems, without prior permission in writing from the Publisher, except for brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kruse, Megan.
Call me home : a novel / by Megan Kruse.
pages cm
ISBN
978-0-9904370-3-1 (ebook)
1.
   Â
Families â Fiction.
I. Title.
ps3611.r856c35 2015
813â².6 â
DC
23
2014020260
Hawthorne Books & Literary Arts
9
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2
2201 Northeast 23rd Avenue
3rd Floor
Portland, Oregon 97212
Form
:
Adam McIsaac/Sibley House
Set in Paperback
For my mother, who taught me to love language; my father, who taught me to love stories; and my brother, who knew those woods even better than I did.
Contents
Introduction:
Elizabeth Gilbert
Lydia:
Tulalip, Washington, 2006
Jackson:
Portland, Oregon, 2010
Lydia:
Interstate 84 East, 2010
Lydia:
Women's Shelter, Alamogordo, New Mexico, 2010
Amy:
Women's Shelter, Alamogordo, New Mexico, 2010
Lydia:
Tulalip, Washington, 2005
Jackson:
Missoula, Montana, 2010
Lydia:
Tulalip, Washington, 2009
Jackson:
Tulalip, Washington, 2009
Lydia:
Tulalip, Washington, 2009
Amy:
Watermelon Thump, Luling, Texas, 2010
Elizabeth Gilbert
WHEN I MET MEGAN KRUSE, SHE WAS TWENTY-ONE
years old and sleeting across America like a storm. I was in Wyoming at an artist's residency, burrowed down to write a memoir, and Megan came blasting through our world, visiting a fellow artist-in-residence. She stayed for just the briefest moment, and then she sleeted out again, but I never forgot her. There was something both hard and bright about this young woman â something that impacted me greatly. She was brave (traveling alone, sleeping in her car, living without) and she gleamed with purpose. She was here to make things, to learn things, to see things, to write things. She was funny. She was bold. She was in a hurry. She would tolerate no obstacles. I got the feeling that fear â whenever it tried to hit Megan â probably just bounced off her and shattered into a million sparkling, harmless pieces.