Sep 202010
A former student of mine (from the days when I used to race home from the Vermont College summer residency and teach novel-writing for a month at the New York State Summer Writers’ Institute at Skidmore College), Darin Strauss, has a new and rather startling memoir just coming out.
Half A Life by Darin Strauss, Interview – The Daily Beast.
I have linked elsewhere to his little essay on my novel structure class.
dg
I saw him just a couple of weeks ago at the Brooklyn Book Fair! The panel was discussing memoir writing about secrets, with Kathryn Harris, Elizabeth Wurtzel, Nelson George, and two other writers. The premise of his new memoir sounds really interesting – he was in a vehicular accident in high school in which a girl was killed, and I believe the girl’s mother told him that from then on he was living for both himself and the woman’s deceased daughter (kind of an unfair responsibility to put on someone, IMHO). Looking forward to reading it.
Furthermore, even though he was exonerated–she rode her bike right in front of his car, and he couldn’t possibly have stopped in time–the girl’s parents sued him (which ultimately came to nothing).
The book was reviewed in the Sunday NY Times about three weeks ago.