Ordinary Grace
Ordinary Grace
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summaries & Analyses
Author Insights
NEWQuizzes
NEWReading Tools
William Kent Krueger on Ordinary Grace
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A summer that refused to leaveThe idea for the book sat untouched for more than five years. What held it in place was a specific season from Krueger’s own past: the summer he turned thirteen, spent in a small Midwestern town, which he carried with unusual vividness into adulthood. When he finally explained why that age exerted such a pull, he was talking about a threshold that almost every reader has crossed.
That’s such an important period of life for a boy. It’s a threshold when he’s on the cusp of leaving childhood behind but not quite ready for manhood. It’s a memorable, poignant, confusing time of life.
The Cork O’Connor series, his long-running mystery sequence centered on a sheriff torn between Irish Catholic and Ojibwe traditions, had always carried a spiritual undercurrent. But the demands of plot kept that thread constrained. This book was the chance to follow it without restriction. The question he’d been circling for years was not theological in any formal sense; it was closer to a confession about where he actually stood.
The question of the spiritual journey has been an important one my whole life. I’ve never felt comfortable about religion, and I’ve always felt as if I’m on a spiritual pilgrimage to a place that hasn’t been revealed to me yet. But what I’ve seen in life is that we experience the divine every day, in the blessings and graces that we offer one another, in our ordinary kindnesses, in our habitual forgiving. And I wanted that outlook to be at the heart of Ordinary Grace.
His publisher was skeptical, and Krueger knew the commercial risk was real: his earlier standalone, The Devil’s Bed, had sold poorly because readers wouldn’t follow him away from Cork. He wrote the book anyway. The explanation he gave later frames what it cost him to commit to a project no one was asking for.
I hope all writers, at some point in their careers, have the experience of finding the story that feels to them as if they were always meant to write it. That’s how I felt about Ordinary Grace. Yes, it was an idea my publisher was pretty tepid about, but it was a story that spoke to me on such a deep level that I had to write it.
How he wrote it
A story that built itself as he typedKrueger’s Cork O’Connor novels begin with a complete plot: the murderer identified, the motive fixed, every red herring placed before a word is written. He abandoned that method entirely here. Going into the manuscript he knew only two things, and the rest arrived day by day at the desk.
The writing of ‘Ordinary Grace’ was nothing like I’d ever experienced before. The story revealed itself to me. Every day I sat down to write, the story would reveal itself to me a little more and a little more. [paraphrased from audio]
The manuscript’s original title, Awful Grace, came straight from the Aeschylus epigraph. Krueger had first encountered the passage not on a page but at a funeral: Bobby Kennedy delivered a version of it at his brother’s memorial service, and it stayed with Krueger for decades. That origin matters because it explains what he understood the epigraph to be about before he wrote a single chapter.
I first heard this quote — though it’s actually a misquote — when Bobby Kennedy delivered it at his brother’s memorial service. It seemed such a profound, and in a way, profoundly sad view of growing up, of awakening from the sleep of childhood, that it stayed with me across decades.
As the draft deepened, the title Awful Grace stopped fitting what the book was actually becoming. Krueger changed it mid-manuscript. The new title then reached forward and generated a scene he had not yet written: Jake’s stutter-free prayer at the funeral arrived as a consequence of the title, not the other way around.
The working title for the manuscript was Awful Grace, taken from the Aeschylus quote. I was never happy with that title. As I moved further into the manuscript and realized it was a story about the ordinary blessings we offer one another in our daily lives — our willingness to forgive, our willingness to embrace the brokenness that is a part of being human — I decided on the title Ordinary Grace.
Every detail of the Drum family had a living source. Ruth Drum’s line about being “nervous as a loose shutter in a storm” came word for word from Krueger’s own mother’s answer on a Famous Writer’s School test, written nearly sixty years before the novel appeared. He was just as direct about the structural reason for giving Frank’s narration the shape it has: he needed the voice to feel like memory recovered at a distance, not events reported in sequence.
I wanted this story to feel like reminiscence rather than a simple recounting of what occurred in that fateful summer of 1961. So I knew I had to be careful with the voice. I wanted the story to flow in a kind of reverie, in the way our recall of the past often comes to us. I wanted the language to be both ordinary and at the same time lyrical. When I heard the voice of Frank Drum begin to tell this story, I knew I had it.
The personal thread
Offering himself to the reader’s judgmentKrueger’s Goodreads annotations for the novel are unusually candid about which emotions belong to him and which belong to Frank. On the question of how accurately Frank Drum captures what it felt like to be thirteen, he left no room for ambiguity: what Frank expresses was not invented from outside but recovered from inside.
I wrote this story in large measure based on the summer I was thirteen years old. What Frank expresses is exactly how I felt at thirteen.
The Cork O’Connor books maintain a professional distance: a plot-driven crime series lets an author stay on the far side of the page. Ordinary Grace collapsed that distance. In a May 2013 interview at the Recorded Books studio in New York, shortly before the book’s release, Krueger described the particular vulnerability of putting the Drum family’s emotional life on the page when that family was built from his own.
Writing Ordinary Grace exposed his heart in a way that “was scary, and meant that I was offering myself openly to my readers to make judgments of me, which doesn’t happen in the Cork O’Connor books.”
That exposure turned out to be the book’s defining quality. What he’d always held back in the crime series became, here, the entire point.
On what the book is wrestling with
Grace without the capital GReaders coming to the book from its Edgar Award reputation, or from the Cork series, often arrive expecting a mystery. Krueger was deliberate about correcting that expectation without dismissing the plot entirely. The reframing he offers goes beyond genre; it names what kind of attention the novel actually requires.
Although the story has a solid mystery component, it’s not really a whodunnit. It’s a novel about family, about faith, about the painful way in which wisdom comes to us, things all people understand and can relate to.
The word “awful” in the Aeschylus epigraph stops many readers cold and sends them in the wrong direction. Krueger had a specific reading of it, rooted in how Nathan Drum, the minister at the center of the novel, would understand the word’s older meaning. That reading reframes the entire epigraph’s function.
In Nathan’s view, it’s simply that the grace of God is beyond comprehension and is so amazing that we can only stand before it with awe.
Krueger drew a firm line between the spiritual and the religious in how he spoke about the book’s intentions. The distinction mattered because the novel’s minister father, Nathan Drum, wrestles with faith in ways organized religion rarely validates. In a video interview, Krueger placed the book on one specific side of that line.
I think of ‘Ordinary Grace’ not as a religious novel, but as a spiritual novel because I wasn’t trying to bang the drum for any particular religious denomination or belief system. [paraphrased from audio]
The target he was aiming for was smaller and closer: the unremarkable exchanges between people in which, his book argues, grace actually lives.
What he wants us to sit with
Simple miracles in the wreckage of a summerKrueger wrote the book in a sustained rush he described as the easiest and most satisfying work of his career, which he attributed to drawing constantly from his own experience rather than inventing from scratch. The ease, he suggested, was a signal about where the book’s center of gravity was. When he named what he wanted to leave with readers, the claim was deliberately small.
I wanted to say our lives are full of simple miracles and ordinary grace.
The widest claim he made about fiction applies with particular force to Ordinary Grace, where three deaths occur in a single summer and the mystery of who caused them is finally less absorbing than what the Drum family does with the weight of survival. At Killer Nashville, he stated his understanding of what stories are actually for.
A story is not about what happens; it’s really about the people things happen to.