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
easier memoir
Not to be too 'Tale of Two Cities' about it, but I find writing a memoir easier than writing fiction, and more difficult.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
best novels share
Even the best novels have their share of stinker lines.
arguing eternal seemed
To a lot of us, literature's eternal significance had seemed beyond arguing - like, say, the illegality of government-sponsored torture.
good people western
What's Denver's feel? I know there're mountains, and people in western hats, but I never got a good sense of the city.
bad hurts
You get a bad review with a novel, and it hurts. But I imagine if you get a bad review with a memoir, it hurts more because you can always say, 'Well, they didn't like my characters,' but when you're the character, it's like, 'Oh, yeah, they actually didn't like me.'
A subplot is a distinguishing characteristic of the novel; the short story, for example, does not need subplots.
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.
best people
Often it's the people who know a place least well who write about it best because they see it fresh.
ability alone career choice deprived life love morning romantic shared sisters symbols wake women
After a life deprived of everything from romantic love to the choice of when to wake up in the morning, after 29 years without the ability to have a career or even to be alone at toilet, the Bijani sisters are not symbols but women who have had to live a shared life of constant, quotidian sacrifice.