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
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.
people suppose
I suppose that, for most of us, the fascination of conjoined twins is that such people can serve as symbols.
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.
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.
aspen bucks freelance gig nightlife paid school
I went to Aspen right after school and got a freelance gig writing articles for the 'Aspen Times.' I was their nightlife correspondent. They paid me fifty bucks an article.
My training and my inclination is to invent.
far island
My wife and I live in Brooklyn, N.Y., not too far from where my Long Island childhood happened.
asks happens improvised parameters standard strict though
My prayer is improvised - though like some standard jazz performance, the improv happens within pretty strict parameters - and asks for nothing.
approach fact figured god judaism relate universal
I think it's a wonderful fact about Judaism - at least about the approach to Judaism I most relate to: There are no universal answers. We don't have it all figured out. God is unknowable.
job technology understand
I got a job writing for a financial technology newsletter in Manhattan. I didn't even understand what I was writing about. The newsletter had, like, 2,000 subscribers, and it was $700 a year for a subscription.
finding harder learning mass memoir people ready saw seeing structure yes
What makes writing a memoir difficult is harder to quantify. Is it learning to know when you're ready to talk about something? Is it seeing the structure in a lumpen mass of fact? Is it finding out what you were really like as other people saw you? Yes to each.
good
Write what you think is good, is the whole of the law.
glad liked
Usually, as a fiction writer, you get e-mails saying, 'I liked your book,' or 'I didn't like it.' You don't get something saying, 'I'm really glad this is in the world.'
born died elizabeth forgotten till work writers wrote
V. S. Pritchett was one of the most admired, fun, talked-about writers of the 20th century: he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth for his work with prose. He was born in 1900, wrote till he died in 1997, and has been tidily forgotten ever since. This is a real shame.