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
best novels share
Even the best novels have their share of stinker lines.
faith
Faith is a private issue. At least, I consider it to be one.
crowded folding guys pads policeman scribbling supporting witnesses
A tragedy's first act is crowded with supporting players, policeman scribbling in pads and making radio calls, witnesses crimping their faces, EMS guys folding equipment.
arguing eternal seemed
To a lot of us, literature's eternal significance had seemed beyond arguing - like, say, the illegality of government-sponsored torture.
detail diary matters memoirs memory percent private rarely unreliable
Memoirs are - memory is - rarely 100 percent accurate. Any autobiography is a construct, ballpark, even unnatural. Private diaries, too, can be unreliable - a detail that matters only if the diary is read.
bring lives maybe memoirs popular trouble writes
Maybe the 'Million Little Pieces' of the world are so popular because no one ever writes memoirs about PTA chairwomen; what memoirists do, and often get in trouble for, is bring interesting lives to light.
answer asking doubts god good happen intended points thanks whether
Now, whether my not asking for good things to happen to me is subconsciously intended to win me brownie points with God is something I can't answer. But I do feel the need to give thanks and also not to feel hypocritical by asking for things when I have doubts that God would answer me.
knowledge love trains
My knowledge of trains - and love before first sight, love at negative-one sight - comes from Alfred Hitchcock.
good trouble
Like all writing rules, the injunction to start with the trouble can be broken, and it should be sometimes - if there's good reason.
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.
joined people
My first book is about twins who are attached: two people who are joined and can't escape each other.
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.
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.
brooklyn feeling hands identical lives perhaps slide writer writers
Perhaps it's because a writer lives in Brooklyn that he'd want to get away from it. It can be very sustaining, this community of writers - sometimes it's the feeling of many hands giving you a boost. But all that identical ambition can be choking, too. The many hands slide up to your throat.