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
people suppose
I suppose that, for most of us, the fascination of conjoined twins is that such people can serve as symbols.
joined people
My first book is about twins who are attached: two people who are joined and can't escape each other.
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 people
Often it's the people who know a place least well who write about it best because they see it fresh.
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.
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.
chinese delivered few food high job lived mine people six towns
I delivered Chinese food on Long island, which is pretty depressing. I lived with my parents and did that for six months. I got a job a few towns over from mine so I wouldn't have to see people from my high school.
guess people
I guess when you write a personal story, people feel compelled to share their own stories.
hard might people respect work wrong
You can work really hard and well on something, and someone you respect might hate it; worse, they're not empirically wrong for doing so. This is scary, especially for people who haven't been published.
eager engage few giant main people sound trust whose
The main thing is to think strategically about what will engage your readers. Trust me when I tell you that few people are eager to read a story whose opening lines sound like a dissertation on giant bugs.
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.
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.
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.
best novels share
Even the best novels have their share of stinker lines.