ALU Summer Book Club: An interview with Suzy Krause, author of I Think We’ve Been Here Before

I Think We’ve Been Here Before begins with an intriguing premise: what if you knew the end of the world was imminent? In Suzy Krause’s hands, this question opens the door to a tender and thought-provoking story that weaves together the idea of fate, missed connections, and the small mysteries that shape our lives. But this is more than a clever hook—it’s a heartfelt, gently humorous novel about the power of human connection, the possibility of second chances, and what it all means, in the end.

Buy your own copy here on All Lit Up for 15% off (or find a copy from your local indie using our Shop Local finder).

Read on for our interview with the author.

All Lit Up: We read that a recurring dream you had about the end of the world sparked your novel I Think We’ve Been Here Before in motion. Can you share how that initial idea evolved into a novel? Where did you begin developing the story?

Suzy Krause: Yes, it was the coziest apocalypse dream ever: I was standing on a hill watching this comet or something come toward me, and in different iterations of the dream I was with different people—my husband, my whole family, my dad, etc—and in each one I was really aware that we were at peace with each other. I’d wake up feeling very calm and happy, and I knew that was a strange thing in and of itself. It felt like a challenge: could I recreate that scenario and feeling in a book?

Around the same time, I was decorating the tree with my family and the song Last Christmas came on. I made a joke about how someone should write a rom-com about the end of the world and call it Last Christmas, and my husband was like, “You could do that.”

I sat down and wrote the last chapter of the book that night. It feels very fitting in retrospect, that this story began with the end.

ALU: To quote from a scene in the book: “And maybe this is how time has always worked; maybe time is all over the place…like a deck of cards being thrown into the air and then gathered and put in order after the fact.” The novel plays with the idea of synchronicities, déjà vu, and time in compelling ways, and you interweave memories in a way that feels recurring. How did you develop and deepen these ideas while writing?

SK: I’ve always loved thinking about time, and hated thinking about it. This book comes on the heels of many, many years of thinking about time, the way we perceive it, the way we interact with it, how straightforward and easy it can seem if you don’t want to think about it too hard, and how unfathomable it can feel if you do—which is also a point of fascination for me. Most people have experienced synchronicities and déjà vu, and so many are able to just go, “Well that was weird,” and move along. But then there are those of us who compile these mental lists of all the weird experiences and feelings we have and want an explanation even though we know we’ll probably never get one. Writing this book was like playing in a sandbox for me; it was a place to give some of these feelings and experiences to fictitious characters and see them play out, to let them ponder some ridiculous things and present some weird theories, see if I could arrive at even one plausible explanation.

ALU: How did you go about building your characters in the novel? Were any of them especially difficult to write?

SK: These characters were actually, for once, very easy to write, because they’re rural Saskatchewan people, and I grew up in rural Saskatchewan, in a village with a population of about 200. They all felt so familiar to me. But my starting point for the characters wasn’t with individual people (I didn’t want people from my hometown to be recognizing themselves!), it was the relationships they had with each other. When I started writing Marlen and Hilda, for example, I didn’t sketch each character out separately, I wrote them as a couple, wrote about the way they related to each other. Same with Irene and her son, Irene and her father, Irene and her sister. After I’d gotten each relationship figured out, then I focused on fleshing out the people individually. It was kind of a fun way to do it, and it’s interesting to see in reviews that so many people think of this book as being mainly about relationships.

ALU: Were there parts of this book that surprised you as you wrote—directions the story or characters took that you didn’t anticipate?

SK: YES. My first draft of this book was a very straight-forward (and short) story about a farm family facing the apocalypse. There were no speculative elements, no Berlin storyline. I got all the way to the end and was in the middle of writing the last chapter when I realized that I had—subconsciously—set myself up to do more. I wrote another book during the pandemic about a young couple who meet each other and have this intense feeling of déjà vu, as though they’ve experienced an entire lifetime together, but I got about halfway through writing it and realized I didn’t know how to explain their strange connection. I set that book aside and forgot about it—until I finished my first draft of this book and realized that I had everything I needed to solve the first book’s problem. So I went back to the beginning and began braiding the two books together, adding this third dimension, the explanation for the déjà vu. This also allowed me to delve into synchronicity stuff and time weirdness for which I’ve always wanted an outlet.

It was so much fun.

ALU: There’s a tension between the surreal and the mundane throughout the novel. How did you approach balancing tone, letting the strange and the familiar live side by side?

SK: I think this is just how I see the world, and it comes out very naturally when I write—which is probably why I got to the end of that first draft and realized the groundwork had been laid to really lean into the surreality of it. Life is so weird; reality is so watery. If you leave me alone in a room for too long, I can really freak myself out just sitting there thinking about this. Like, the fact that there could possibly be an explainable, demonstrable, physical reason why two people might think about each other at the same time? It’s too wild. And yet, we are still pretty well constrained by all the usual, boring laws of gravity and physics and time. It’s like we’re existing in two different genres at once and you can kind of choose to focus on one and ignore the other.

ALU: Finally, what’s your opinion about déjà vu and synchronicities? Do you think there’s something meaningful to them, or is it all just coincidence?

SK: I think they have to mean something! I don’t know what it is! The solution I came up with for déjà vu in this book was based off of a real study that was done on a dying person’s brain, so, I mean, it could actually just be as simple as what Marlen, in the book, says in the last chapter—and this is either a very comforting idea or an absolutely horrific one, depending on your individual experience of your life.

The idea of it being random and meaningless is even more terrifying and heartbreaking, though, in my opinion. I hate the thought of beautiful, fascinating things being random and meaningless—and I’m fascinated by the thought that other people might actually find comfort in that idea, or that they might find it neutral, or that they might not think it’s worth thinking about at all. I think it’s cool that we all come to these ideas differently, and come away from these conversations feeling differently about them.

Suzy Krause is the bestselling author of Sorry I Missed You and Valencia and Valentine. She grew up on a little farm in rural Saskatchewan and now lives in Regina, where she writes novels inspired by crappy jobs, creepy houses, personal metaphorical apocalypses, and favourite songs. Her work has been translated into Russian and Estonian. Suzy lives in Regina, Saskatchewan.

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Thanks to Suzy for answering our questions! Get I Think We’ve Been Here Before here on All Lit Up for 15% off (discount code INTHECLUB2025), all summer long. And join us next Tuesday when the team gets together to chat about our reactions to the book!

Keep on top of all summer book club happenings here.