Submissions are open for the 2022 MAYDAY Creative Nonfiction Prize!
Winner receives $1,000 and publication. Deadline: Nov. 1, 2022.
Elliott Bueler: I know we’re here to talk about writing, but I actually want to start by talking about another medium I know you appreciate—film. I’ve heard you refer to nonfiction writing as documentary film in which the author shoots hundreds of hours only to cut it down to a two-hour movie. So how can you tell when it’s working, when the book/essay-as-film is doing what it’s supposed to do?
Darin Strauss: That’s the trick. Flaubert says it’s when you start changing commas to semi-colons and then change them back. I think Lorrie Moore says it’s when you know what’s wrong but don’t know how to fix it. There is a time to revise—it’s the key thing. But there’s also a time to walk away. Finding that is hard; being able to know is a skill you develop like any other.
Or you get lucky. I once sent a book to a friend, as a draft, and he said, “I like the elliptical ending!” I thought: huh? Turns out, I’d sent him the file with the last chapter missing. It changed the way I wrapped up that book.
EB: Half a Life feels like exactly that kind of documentary-book, where hundreds of hours of life were cut to something feature length. What did the process of writing (and re-writing) that book teach you about curation?
DS: Thanks. That book was much longer. I realized memoir is not quite a record of a life; it’s a record of your memory about some part or parts of your life. I realized all the stuff that wasn’t about the story I wanted to tell—my accident—had to go, no matter how much I liked the writing. True to my life or not, it wasn’t relevant to this story.
EB: The book seems very aware of author-as-character, how he appears first during all of those hours of lived experience and then on the page in the final product. How much of what we see at the last is the result of simply translating you-then versus crafting or even discovering him?
DS: I don’t know about that. I just tried to tell it like it was. The difficulty was finding enough distance to tell the truth—not my biased version of the truth, but what I believe the actual truth to be. That’s objectivity, but not quite a “character,” I hope.
EB: For a novelist, you have an interesting relationship with the truth, having incorporated it in one form or another from your debut, Chang and Eng, to your most recent book, The Queen of Tuesday. What is it about fact as medium/accelerant/creative constraint that won’t let you fully out of its grip?
DS: Great question. I think it’s just that certain stories seem great to tell, and that’s what I go toward. It could be totally invented, or it could be—like with Lucille Ball, or the conjoined twins—that I thought these real-life people had great stories, but (not being them, or having access to their thoughts) I couldn’t tell it as fully as I’d hoped if I wrote it as a straight biography. I studied with Doctorow, so maybe I was infected by his enthusiasms.
EB: You’ve been the recipient of various prizes, some that I think it’s safe to say were pretty life-changing. What would you say to the prospective winner of the MAYDAY Nonfiction prize, who is likely closer to the beginning of their career as opposed to, say, four or five books deep?
DS: Prizes are great, in that they can give confidence and a boost. But, as with a bad review (or a good review), don’t let it affect your view of your own work too much. We know, I think, how close to our potential we are, without external validation, or validation’s sad opposite.
EB: Themes, like writing prompts, can be slightly horoscope-y, allowing for a measure of retrofitting on a writer’s part. But in the case of “Disappearance,” of people, places, past lives, etc, particularly given the last couple of transformative years we’ve endured, what sorts of work do you hope come out of this time that might be reflected in the MAYDAY Nonfiction Contest entrants?
DS: I think exercises are great, but they should be judged on the quality of the work they engender, I think. Beyond that? Looking for messages in art has, I think, gotten art into some rough places in history. Like Nabokov or Kundera or Lorrie Moore or Toni Morrison (in this way only!), I think art for art’s sake is what we should be focusing on.
DARIN STRAUSS is the best-selling author of four novels, most recently 2020’s The Queen of Tuesday, and the memoir Half a Life. The recipient of a Guggenheim in fiction writing and numerous other awards, Strauss has seen his work translated into fourteen languages, and published in more than twenty countries. He is a Clinical Associate Professor of Writing at New York University, and he lives with his wife and children in Brooklyn.
ELLIOTT BUELER is a westerner living in New York City, a journalist, a dad, a researcher, a writer, and an editor. He holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from New York University and he’s currently a nonfiction editor at MAYDAY.
