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
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.
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.'
good
Write what you think is good, is the whole of the law.
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.
people suppose
I suppose that, for most of us, the fascination of conjoined twins is that such people can serve as symbols.
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.
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.
ideal mind sort
When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter.
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.
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.
discern few good novelist truth
It's good training for a novelist to try to discern the truth about a place after only a few glimpses of it.
I've had menial jobs, and 'professional writer' isn't one of them.