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.'

Darin Strauss

Categorized in : You Me Bad Character

Things don't go away. They become you.

Darin Strauss

going-away

Regret doesn't budge things; it seems crazy that the force of all that human want can't amend a moment, can't even stir a pebble.

Darin Strauss

regret crazy want

The cracks in old friendships are measured in awkward pauses.

Darin Strauss

old-friendship awkward cracks

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.

Darin Strauss

perfectly-normal crazy thinking

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

Darin Strauss

sibling distance passion

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.

Darin Strauss

senior kissing mom

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

Darin Strauss

rose fall

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.

Darin Strauss

skins light watches

When you know you are dying, self-deceptions fly from your bedside like embers off a bonfire.

Darin Strauss

deception dying self

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

Darin Strauss

capable sometimes world

A tragedy's first act is crowded with supporting players: witnesses crimping their faces, policemen scribbling in pads and making radio calls, EMS guys unfolding equipment, tubes and wheels.

Darin Strauss

guy tragedy player

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.

Darin Strauss

emotional dark running

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.

Darin Strauss

special self kindness

Sin in the Second City is a masterful history lesson, a harrowing biography, and - best of all - a superfun read. The Everleigh story closely follows the turns of American history like a little sister. I can't recommend this book loudly enough.

Darin Strauss

little-sister cities book

Diminish the influence of fate

Darin Strauss

diminish fate influence

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

Darin Strauss

borrow borrowing successful fiction

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.

Darin Strauss

out who single twins

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.

Darin Strauss

king know you writing

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.

Darin Strauss

city new great new-york

Too much contemporary fiction seems purposefully to address small things in small ways. And yet why not try for the all-inclusive, the gripping, for the audacious?

Darin Strauss

small try small-things too-much