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.
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.
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.
beef great learned mile national per salads square theaters
In Minneapolis, I learned that there are more theaters per square mile than in any U.S. city but New York, and we also had great Midwestern beef in our salads in a plaza overlooking the national headquarters of Target, Inc.
guitarist jam musician perhaps slide trucks
I'm no fan of jam bands. You can take your Gov't Mule, your Phish, your Rusted Root. But Derek Trucks is a special musician - perhaps the greatest slide guitarist who ever lived.
closest five minutes mojo peace twin
I have twin six-year-old boys. Have no mojo. The closest thing to a mojo I have is five minutes of peace.
invented
I'm very strict in my belief that non-fiction should be truthful, and fiction is for invented narratives.
brings close either particular sets small writer
In each scene, the writer sets up a situation, which brings a conflict as well as either a small victory or a loss at the close of that particular scene.
I've had menial jobs, and 'professional writer' isn't one of them.
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.
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.
best novels share
Even the best novels have their share of stinker lines.