Darin Strauss
“My training and my inclination is to invent. Memoir was in some ways an easier form (you skip the hard, dreaming-stuff-up work) and in some ways more difficult (Wait, you can’t just dream stuff up?). The novelist has permission to do whatever she chooses to supercharge whatever's interesting in her story. This is also known as freedom.”
“A gorgeous, Technicolor take on America in the middle of the twentieth century.”
“Darin Strauss has resurrected a lost world—the grand movie that never aired, the truncated epic of what might have been between Lucille Ball and his grandfather. Part elegy, part mystery, part speculative memoir, here is a love story unlike any you’ve read before—spiked with Hollywood scandal and the secrets families keep across generations. Strauss is a beautiful and funny and piercing writer, and this book is a gift.”
“The Queen of Tuesday is a striking exploration of how fame confounds the lives of prominent and obscure people. . . . Strauss conjures up those heady days of I Love Lucy with such vibrancy that it’s impossible not to hope that everything might work out after all. . . . This is well-trod celebrity gossip, though exceptionally well told. But what makes The Queen of Tuesday so peculiar and fascinating is the story that Strauss weaves through it about his grandfather, Izzy.”
“At the center of this elegant, painful, stunningly honest memoir thrums a question fundamental to what it means to be human: What do we do with what we’ve been given?”
Darin Strauss is the internationally bestselling author of the novels Chang and Eng, The Real McCoy, and More Than it Hurts You, the memoir Half a Life, and most recently the acclaimed novel, The Queen of Tuesday : A Lucille Ball Story (Random House, 2020). Strauss is the recipient of a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Guggenheim, an American Library Association Award, and numerous other prizes. His books have been named New York Times Notable Books, Entertainment Weekly Must Books of the Year, and Newsweek, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Amazon, Chicago Tribune, and NPR Best Books of the Year, among others.
On noting the challenges of writing fiction versus memoir, Strauss explains, “You have to plum just as deeply in fiction as you do in nonfiction or else it’s just not going to be good. That’s the thing about writing – you have to be completely honest. People have to recognize something universally true or else they’re going to think they’re reading something that’s, like, a daydream.”
His work has been widely anthologized and excerpted, has been translated into fourteen languages and published in nineteen countries He is a Clinical Associate Professor at NYU's creative writing program, and lives in Brooklyn, NY with his family.
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