CM: How did your having written about it — this therapy project of yours — change the way you thought about the accident?
DS: You know, Mailer wrote The Armies of the Night as a response to an article in Time. He thought the reporter had misrepresented his (Mailer’s) behavior during an anti-Vietnam march. So Mailer begins his Armies by reprinting the entire Time article, and then there’s this: “Now we may leave Time to find out what happened.” The resultant book is a four-hundred-page letter to the editor.
I found myself with the same frustration, the same impulse, raised to a higher power. How crassly my local newspaper had portrayed the accident! As if the sadness quotient depended on Celine’s having been the most popular kid, the class pretty girl, some kind of prom superstar. I felt protective of the real her, who had been made 2-D by the reporter, simplified into something she wasn’t. In fact, maybe that’s where my fiction training came into play — knowing how to return nuance to the story, and chiaroscuro. At least, I hope it did. I left the pages of Newsday to write what really happened.
CM: Can you talk about the relation between the earlier works of fiction and this book? Similarities of voice, or perspective? Despite that this is a memoir and that those are novels, you wrote them all. They’re all Darin Strauss books. Can you find commonalities in them all?
DS: Saul Bellow once said he didn’t want ever to go to therapy, because he didn’t care to learn why he wrote what he did. Well, I’ve learned why I have. At the funeral home, Celine’s mother told me: “you are living … for two people.” My first book, Chang and Eng, was about conjoined twins — two men sharing one life. The first line is: “This is the end I have feared since we were a child.” The narrator’s both singular and plural—“we feared … I was.” Eng Bunker lived as two people and one person.
The Real McCoy centered on a man who threw off his identity, and in coming to New York lived as an impostor. That was how I felt, having fled to the city, having told no one about my past, about who I was.
More Than It Hurts You is about a Long Island family with a terrible secret.…
It’s embarrassing how obviously I was writing about this incident — without my having known it.
CM: And so now, having written it head-on, what’s the difference between examining the accident obliquely and actually facing it head-on, page-on?
DS: One difference is: writing such non-fiction is basically a very public therapy session. As you know, you write a novel, interviewers ask about book-related points of interest. “How’d you come up with that character? What were you thinking with that plot twist?” etc. But when you write a memoir, people ask about your state of mind. “Did writing the book help you? And how do you feel now?” It’s a very odd difference.
CM: All right, then. So, how do you feel? I know how I felt when I first read the piece in GQ. It took my breath away. Quite literally. I remember gasping a moment. There is so much volume in a life.
DS: There is volume in each life, and a writer tries (at least sometimes) to turn it up, the better to transcribe the noise. Most people — healthy people — work to turn it down: to find a little quiet in which to live. Maybe that’s why it’s such a weird job. (Philip Roth: “This profession even fucks up grief.”) Anyway.
I’m of a much stronger mind than ever about it now. At least I hope I am. This profession didn’t fuck up my grief; it allowed me to feel it, and then at least to begin gesturing past it.
In my friend David Lipsky’s excellent book with/about David Foster Wallace, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, Wallace says that a small part of who he is craves fame, but that this part doesn’t get to drive. The fact that Celine died is present still in who I am — it would be inhuman if it weren’t at least in some way present forever — but it doesn’t get to drive my life. I used to wonder what would’ve happened if Celine had cut in front of a perfect driver, a Mario Andretti. Would that have been enough to save her life? I think not; I think physics dictates that nobody could have avoided her. But I now understand this Andretti vs. Strauss question is useless. She cut in front of me. And I did my best to avoid her. That’s all I can control.
I recently heard from a friend of the girl’s — someone I never knew. She read Half a Life and told me: “Stop beating yourself up. She committed suicide. She talked and even wrote about death constantly in the week before she died.” I didn’t want to hear that — I don’t know if it’s true, and it’s also not my business. Celine around school seemed happy to me. (Though admittedly I didn’t know her well.) I did what I could to avoid hitting her, and that’s the only part that concerns me.
All the same, when the book was about to come out, I wanted to write the parents a letter, a warning. Of course, they’d sued me after having said they knew I was blameless — and promising they would always support me. But I never blamed them for anything. (How could I? They’d lost a daughter, and I was walking around.) So I wanted to spare them the pain of being surprised by the book. But the simple act of Googling them and writing the letter was hard — harder than writing the book. It never goes fully away.
CM: Lorca talks about the pulse of the wound that goes through to the opposite side. I suppose that’s what you’ve located. It’s a very fine piece of work indeed. More than that, it seems necessary.
DS: This was a wound I didn’t acknowledge; I was like Samsa in the beginning of The Metamorphosis, unaware I was schlepping around with eight skinny legs and an armor-plated belly. But the messages I’ve gotten from suffering people — distress signals, really — have strengthened my faith. I was going to say in books, but in everything.
To end on another Bellow (mis)quote, sometimes literary books believe all questions of truth have overwhelmingly formidable answers, uncongenial, hostile to us. It may be, however, that truth is not always so punitive. I learned this. There may be truths on the side of life … there may be some truths that are our friends in the universe.
READING GROUP QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Strauss includes a number of scenes (of him chatting up girls at the accident site, and of going to the movies later) that portray him in an unfavorable light. Do you think this makes him less likable, or more so? How effective is he in winning your sympathy? Do you think he wants to?
2. It took Strauss half a life to write this book. How do you think it would have differed if he’d tried to write it at the time of the accident? How would it be different if he’d waited another eighteen years?
3. Strauss writes that he thought of college as a “witness protection program”—he went off to school and told basically no one about the accident. Do you think this time was necessary for him to heal, or would he have benefited from talking about the accident to a lot of people right away?
4. As serious as this book is, it does include moments of humor. Strauss pokes gentle fun at “the Shrink”—a psychologist he saw soon after the crash — and at the “Death & Dying” class he took in college. What purpose do these passages serve in this often somber book?