Darin Strauss Quotes

Not to be too 'Tale of Two Cities' about it, but I find writing a memoir easier than writing fiction, and more difficult.

I'd violated the primary rule of junior and senior high
don't get people talking about you too much. This was wearing the brightest shirt on the playground. This was Mom giving you a kiss in the lobby.

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.

I have twin six-year-old boys. Have no mojo. The closest thing to a mojo I have is five minutes of peace.

Sometimes one learns too early, as I did, what the world is capable of.

I've come to see our central nervous system as a kind of vintage switchboard, all thick foam wires and old-fashioned plugs. The circuitry isn't properly equipped; after a surplus of emotional information the system overloads, the circuit breaks, the board runs dark. That's what shock is.

Faith is a private issue. At least, I consider it to be one.

Relationships are physics. Time transforms things- it has to, because the change from me to we means clearing away the fortifications you'r put up around your old personality. Living with Susannah made me feel as if I started riding Einstein's famous theoretical bus. Here's my understanding of that difficult idea, nutshelled: if you're riding a magic Greyhound, equipped for light-speed travel, you'll actually live though less time than will any pedestrians whom the bus passes by. So, for a neighbor on the street with a stopwatch, the superfast bus will take two hours to travel from Point A to Point B. But where you're on that Greyhound, and looking at the wipe of the world out those rhomboidial coach windows, the same trip will take just under twenty-four minutes. Your neighbor, stopwatch under thumb, will have aged eighty-six percent more than you have. It's hard to fathom. But I think it's exactly what adult relationships do to us: on the outside, years pass, lives change. But inside, it's just a day that repeats. You and your partner age at the same clip; it seems not time has gone by. Only when you look up from your relationship- when you step off the bus, feel the ground under your shoes- do you sense the sly, soft absurdity of romance physics.

This empty act could no more be mistaken for a mother's touch than the wind that fills out some dress on a clothesline might be confused with an actual body.

Things don't go away. They become you.

And he sought, with quick vanity, the reflection in a big mirror opposite him. Just as fast he turned away. He appeared to have reached that situation of health where vanity meant you didn't risk your face in the mirror.

I think each family has a funhouse logic all its own, and in that distortion,in that delusion, all behavior can seem both perfectly normal and crazy.

The part of the brain that isn't automatic is an imagining machine, feeling all possibilities of feelings: it keeps pushing its way into this marshy, pleasant terrain. You struggle against that push, and start to feel your stomach protest. It's not so much even a type of seriousness as it is a circumstance, into which you pass by slow degrees. I've never seen this sufficiently examined. It mutates into a less-unreal reality that still seems different, somehow, than being fully present. Self hate is rarely unconditional.

I consider myself a Jewish writer - even if my characters frequently are not Jewish - in the same way, I guess, that I consider myself a Jewish man, even though I don't often attend shul.

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.'

At home in bed that first night I had patchy, mundane dreams about normal things. It would be nobler and less uncomfortable to write that I tossed sleeplessly.

I've had menial jobs, and 'professional writer' isn't one of them.

If you're guilty of something, you can focus on that, but if something terrible happens, and you can't imagine how you could have changed it, that's very difficult for the mind. In some ways, it's more difficult not to be at fault because it's a subtler thing.

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.

If the memoirist is borrowing narrative techniques from fiction, shouldn't the novelist borrow a few tricks from successful non-fiction?

Your muscles can tense with hope.

Even the best novels have their share of stinker lines.

Looking back now, there's something that bothers me abut the newspaper article about her death: it has Celine as Knockout, as Queen Bee, as Prom Superstar. The kid the newspaper grieved for wasn't Celine. She was none of those things. Their version of her was less distinctive than the real Celine was, less an individual, devoid of any real-life individual's quirks and smudges. The paper seemed to believe Celine's death could only be fully newsworthy, only fully sad, if she were outlandishly beautiful, outlandishly popular, outlandishly everything.

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.

I think we all build superstructures in our heads, catwalks and trestles that lead us from the acceptance of our own responsibility to the coll mechanics of the factory, where things are an interlocking mess, where everybody's pretty much unaccountable. To be alive is to find a way to blame someone else.

Characters stretching their legs in some calm haven generally don't make for interesting protagonists.

I'm really wary of self-help books.

My knowledge of trains - and love before first sight, love at negative-one sight - comes from Alfred Hitchcock.

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.

By now, the camouflage had become my skin. My friends wouldn't want to know. Who would want to know? I certainly didn't want to know. All I wanted was to hold my assumptions to the light, and to watch them sparkle in their facets, as all sham gemstones do.

Diminish the influence of fate

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.

Things don't go away. They become you. There is no end, as T.S. Eliot somewhere says, but addition: the trailing consequence of further days and hours. No freedom from the past, or from the future.
But we keep making our way, as we have to. We're all pretty much able to deal even with the worst that life can fire at us, if we simply admit that it is very difficult. I think that's the whole of the answer. We make our way, and effort and time give us cushion and dignity. And as we age, we're riding higher in the saddle, seeing more terrain.

My first book is about twins who are attached: two people who are joined and can't escape each other.

What can one do with levels of gloom and guilt, fear and disbelief, of bewilderment above one's capacity to register?

Conjoined twins are identical siblings who develop one placenta out of a single fertilised ovum. No cases of conjoined triplets or quadruplets have been documented.

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.

Passion and platonic friendliness, often contrary siblings, frequently wear similar faces to hide the great distance between them.

Often it's the people who know a place least well who write about it best because they see it fresh.

We can try our human best at the crucial moment, and it might not be good neough.

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.

A tragedy's first act is crowded with supporting players, policeman scribbling in pads and making radio calls, witnesses crimping their faces, EMS guys folding equipment.

I'm very strict in my belief that non-fiction should be truthful, and fiction is for invented narratives.

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.

In order for a narrative to work, the primary character should have a concrete desire - a need that drives her story - and the story's writer should make this goal known to the reader pretty early in the narrative.

My prayer is improvised - though like some standard jazz performance, the improv happens within pretty strict parameters - and asks for nothing.

A good writer knows that if her style and perceptions are really cooking, she can bring anything off. It's okay, of course, for novelists to depict bland, average families living bland, average lives in bland, average towns. But it isn't okay when those novelists don't outshine their bland, average subjects.

One of the disconcerting things about writing for publication is that you're trying to clear your little parcel of land in a field where Taste is king - and, as we all know, there's no accounting for Taste.

All writers have their own pet commandments.

I suppose that, for most of us, the fascination of conjoined twins is that such people can serve as symbols.

The starkest rejection letter might be followed by a million-dollar advance. Don't let rejection start to look the same as failure.

My training and my inclination is to invent.

Love wasn't a thing you fell in, but rose to. It was what stopped you from falling.

Now, whether my not asking for good things to happen to me is subconsciously intended to win me brownie points with God is something I can't answer. But I do feel the need to give thanks and also not to feel hypocritical by asking for things when I have doubts that God would answer me.

In the worst memoirs, you can feel the author justifying himself - forgiving himself - in every paragraph. In the best memoirs, the author is tougher on him- or herself than his or her readers will ever be.

Everybody wants life to speak to them with special kindness. Every personal story begs to be steered toward reverie, toward some relief from unpleasant truths: That you are a self, that beyond anything else you want the best for that self. That, if it is to be you or someone else, you need it to be you, no matter what.

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.

Love was now a mild streamlet that advanced in drips around my feet; despite how hard I worked at tenderness, I could not drown in a thing that shallow.

A subplot is a distinguishing characteristic of the novel; the short story, for example, does not need subplots.

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.

The sky had dropped a curtain on the sun.

The muffling blanket would fall over my thoughts.

You get a bad review with a novel, and it hurts. But I imagine if you get a bad review with a memoir, it hurts more because you can always say, 'Well, they didn't like my characters,' but when you're the character, it's like, 'Oh, yeah, they actually didn't like me.'

I suppose memory has at least two faces, and capricious ones at that.