Darin Strauss
Darin Strauss
Darin Straussis a best-selling American writer whose work has earned a number of awards, including, among numerous others, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Strauss's most recent book is Half a Life, which won the 2011 NBCC Award for memoir/autobiography...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth1 March 1970
CountryUnited States of America
joined people
My first book is about twins who are attached: two people who are joined and can't escape each other.
cases develop identical
Conjoined twins are identical siblings who develop one placenta out of a single fertilised ovum. No cases of conjoined triplets or quadruplets have been documented.
afflicted brothers half novel profound spent sympathy term three whom
I spent three and a half years writing the novel 'Chang & Eng,' about the conjoined brothers for whom the term 'Siamese twins' was contrived, and when I think of these afflicted people, my only emotion is one of profound sympathy.
concrete dealing good guilty people society
Society isn't good at dealing with people who have something concrete to feel guilty about or who are dealing with a loss.
changed fault imagine terrible
If you're guilty of something, you can focus on that, but if something terrible happens, and you can't imagine how you could have changed it, that's very difficult for the mind. In some ways, it's more difficult not to be at fault because it's a subtler thing.
chooses freedom novelist permission
The novelist has permission to do whatever she chooses to supercharge whatever's interesting in her story. This is also known as freedom.
layer life private tv viewing
It's a very performative thing, grief. As with so much in modern life, I think there's a whole performative layer to what we do because we feel like there's a private TV show viewing our lives.
anywhere casts grew half hour manhattan onto ours seemed sort though took totally
Surprisingly, Manhattan casts a sort of undersized shadow onto Long Island. Where I grew up, everyone seemed totally disconnected from the city - ours could have been any suburb, anywhere - though when traffic was thin, it took us only half an hour to get into midtown.
characters generally haven
Characters stretching their legs in some calm haven generally don't make for interesting protagonists.
accounting clear field king land parcel taste trying
One of the disconcerting things about writing for publication is that you're trying to clear your little parcel of land in a field where Taste is king - and, as we all know, there's no accounting for Taste.
far island
My wife and I live in Brooklyn, N.Y., not too far from where my Long Island childhood happened.
work worked york
I thought, 'I'll come back to New York. I worked for the 'Aspen Times' when I lived in Aspen. I'll work for the 'New York Times' when I live in New York.' It didn't work out that way.
blank constant dictated freelance hard paths terror understand
Constant rejection. No security. Career paths being dictated by freelance reviewers. And of course, the terror of the writing desk, of the blank page. Why is it so hard for our non-writer friends to understand this - that it's a job?
failure followed letter might
The starkest rejection letter might be followed by a million-dollar advance. Don't let rejection start to look the same as failure.