“A childhood friend asked me what it’s like to lose everything, and my answer was, ‘It’s swift and nonnegotiable,’” remarks writer Carri Karuhn about the experiences that shaped her debut novel. “There’s nothing you can do. It happened. You have to pick yourself up and move forward.”
In her case, moving forward wasn’t easy, simple or fast, but chatting with her, her wit, survival skills and sense of humor that got her through the bad times are on full display.
Karuhn is originally from the Chicago area and growing up in a place that produced such notable authors as Richard Wright, Upton Sinclair, Raymond Chandler and Sandra Cisneros, perhaps it was fate that she was drawn to writing. “From a very young age, I was interested in writing. I knew it would be the course in my life, but I didn’t know how it would manifest,” she observes. “It took me getting into college to get direction for how to make a living with it.”
That direction was journalism, specifically newspaper reporting and she freelanced for small publications and then moved on to The Chicago Tribune, where she eventually landed a staff position as a general assignment reporter. Several years later, her then-husband got a ...