Rennie asked Danya Kukafka:

Hi Danya! I have never read such beautiful prose until I read (just finished) Notes on an Execution. I feel so lucky to have stumbled upon it and you. I have a question about your use of second person for Ansel's chapters. Why did you choose to use that narrative perspective? Why choose it over first person or third? Thank you in advance.

Danya Kukafka Thank you, Rennie! This is a great question. The first few drafts of the book were actually written with Ansel's perspective in the third person. For years, the first line was actually: "He is a fingerprint." I knew something wasn't quite working, but I couldn't figure out exactly what it was. One day, while watching yet another Ted Bundy documentary for research, I wondered: why do we love Ted Bundy so much? Why do we watch these movies and documentaries and podcasts over and over, thirty years after his death? I asked myself these questions, too. I realized that some strange, perverse part of me wanted to know what it was like inside his head, wanted to understand how someone could be so incredibly evil. That day, I decided to put the reader themselves directly in Ansel's mind: "you" are the serial killer. I rewrote everything in the second person, and it completely came alive.

flag