Yesterday my wife and I traveled to South Carolina to spend five weeks with her parents, and my computer was stolen. It’s very frustrating. I checked it at the curbside. The guy taking the bag said: "You going away for Christmas?" I didn’t want to say, "No, I’m a Jew, but my wife is a Presbyterian, so…." What I ended up saying was: "Yes."  And now look at me. All the work I did the last year, almost all the photos of my newborn twins (see bottom of page): gone.

And then I finally got online, and saw that an article about me in the Village Voice had pissed a lot of people off. One guy wrote: "Wow. What a whiner. [Darin Strauss] sounds like a textbook sociopath trying to manipulate the world into feeling sorry for him." Great.

Not a good day. Anyhow, sorry for the short post, but seeing how I’m at a Kinko’s, and the meter’s running, not to mention I’m nearly suicidal, I think I’ll keep it short today.  Thanks.

p.s.: Despite what the Village Voice story says, I don’t hate bloggers. In fact, I’m soaking in one right now.

Darin Strauss, author of More Than It Hurts You, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and he’ll be here all week. Stay tuned.

The post Darin Strauss and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day appeared first on Jewcy.

This month, in London, an 18-year-old named Laura Williams gave birth to her daughters Faith and Hope – two attached sisters; Hope died on Tuesday night after an operation to seperate them. (Hope’s lungs ended up being too small; she couldn’t breathe after the separation.)

It’s terrible, it’s unimaginably sad, and I thought it had nothing to do with me.

But last Friday, I got a call from a BBC show called Five Live. They wanted me to go on the air to talk about the intricacies of seperation, the psychic toll conjoined twinship can have, etc.

The producer called me and said: "I want to get one thing straight before we interview you. Are you an expert on conjoined twins?"

"No," I said. "I just wrote a novel about some guys from Siam."

The sound of him scratching his chin 5,000 miles away crinkled through my cell headset.

"Right," he said. "Can we have you on, anyway?"

Now, I have what my grandfather called a Yiddisha Kup – a Jewish brain. In other words, I don’t like to turn down a buinsess opportunity. The BBC! My new book, More Than It Hurts You, is set to come out in England and Europe in February! But this is a little girl’s death we’re talking about. And I’m not an expert: just a fiction writer.

"I have to tell you I’m a little uncomfortable about this,"  I said.  

"Well," he said. "You’ve been on with us before."

This was true. Ever since I wrote Chang & Eng, whenever some set of conjoined twins, somewhere, has made the news, I get a phone call. And so I was on BBC’s Five Live once before; it had been the most surreal thing. I’d been on my phone in New York; the interviewer was calling from London, and – sitting in Texas – they had one member of a set of adult conjoined twins on, too. (The other sister refused to participate.) The host had badgered the twin who had agreed to talk, making fun of her because she and her sister had chosen not to try to separate ("Why don’t you want to try? Aren’t you miserable living like that?").  I ended up defending the sister (Lori Schappell) from the interviwer.* After the show, Lori told me she gives my book out to friends, which seemed like the best review I ever got.

Anyway, getting back to this week.

I decided to do the interview, as long as I wouldn’t have to talk about the morality or the science of separation. "I’ll go on if I can talk about Chang & Eng, but i don’t want to profit off the tragedy of this family."

"Sure, sure," the BBC said. (And it has a very stuffy bristish accent, the BBC.)

"So," the interviewer said, first thing. "What do you think of the moral decision by the mother to seperate those girls?"

I muttered something about sadness, about the impossibility of putting oneself in another’s shoes. They seemed okay with it, and I hung up, feeling pretty bad about myself.

I find it amazing that I get to be an expert, just because I wrote a novel. It’s like interviewing George Lucas about the physics of warp speed travel. Oh, well. Like my grandfather would have said, maybe I made a few sales.

*Their story is very interesting. The Schappel twins (I think they’re Jewish) were born attached at the head. Lori works part-time in a hospital laundry; her sister George is a country singer; she won the L.A. Music Award for Best New Country Artist in 1997. She has performed in Germany and Japan, as well as all over the U.S. They live about as separate lives as possible. I am not making this up.

Darin Strauss, author of More Than It Hurts You, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and he’ll be here all week. Stay tuned.

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I did a reading for my novel, More Than It Hurts You, in Huntington today. When you drive far East enough, Long Island, despite being relatively close to New York City, could be any suburban flatland, anywhere. The strip malls, the chain stores – Manhattan’s nearest neighbor seems to aspire to… what? Exurban Atlanta?

It’s a bummer, and yet I have fond memories of it: sweet sixteens, bar/bat mitzvahs, day camps – all the things that my Protestant wife makes fun of me for now. (What does she know? Has she ever played "Coke and Pepsi"?)

It’s an interesting place, Long Island: on the map it looks like a tailless crocodile with its mouth open. The island’s far shore yawns into a pair of peninsula’s a hundred miles east of Manhattan. Huntington is about halfway down the crocodile’s cragged back. And the farther east you go on Long Island, the odder it gets — until you reach the Hamptons, which don’t really count; they’re like an outpost of Manhattan. I think the reason it gets weirder as you go (more stories of murder and hate crimes) is because there’s no one passing through. It’s an island, after all, with all the isolation that the word implies; the only people who go out to Eastern Long Island towns are on their way to Eastern Long Island towns, and who wants to be on their way there?

It seems most of Long Island’s Jews live closer to the city, which is only right; we are called "rootless cosmopolitans," after all.

Still, I grew up only 25 minutes from the city, in a town that was mostly Italian and Irish. And my being Jewish started a school-wide brawl, One kid, let’s call him Tony (since that’s his real name) called me a dirty Jew in fifth grade. This insult simmered for a few days, and then it all boiled over, a huge rumble – his friends (some of whom were Jews) against mine (most of whom were Italians). This fight taught me the hardest lesson I ever learned about human nature. Tony was punching me in the face while one of his friends held my hands behind my back. But then my friend Frank came and freed me, and – at the same time – grabbed this guy Tony, and held his hands. "Hit him!" my friend Frank said. "He’s been hitting you, right?"

I was about to slug him, but he looked up at me with eyes that said, Can you really be so cruel as to exact the same punishment from me? Can’t we let bygones be bygones? I walked away, feeling saintly (if a Jew can feel saintly). Tony freed himself and clocked me in the nose. Which only reinforced my belief: Jews shouldn’t fight. (My friend Rich Cohen, author of "Tough Jews," would doubtless disagree.)

I don’t go back to Long Island very much.

Darin Strauss, author of More Than It Hurts You, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and he’ll be here all week. Stay tuned.

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Today I experienced one of the weirder aspects of being a writer. I did a photo shoot. It’s weird for 2 reasons:

1) because for most of a writer’s life, he’s (or I’m) inside, in his/my underwear, pecking away – one painful sentence at a time – at a 400 page manuscript that, it feels like, no one will ever read.

And 2) Who cares enough about novels anymore to set-up a photo shoot?

Anyway, so the book comes out, and – if you get lucky – a woman will ask you to sit under your desk while her assistant holds a reflector behind you and she barks commands ("Okay, but look meaner this time.").

But let me backtrack.

Today even started out weird. I went to my office at NYU, and ran into my nice, gleefully-talented colleague Jonathan Safran Foer. A bum had just spit on Jonathan’s coat. I mean, a real goober. I laughed at this, and Jonathan did too, but for some reason he seemed more bummed about it than I was. Then a photographer – a nice woman named Alana Cundy – showed up to take my photo for the Village Voice. My latest book, More Than It Hurts You, came out back in June, so I don’t know why they wanted a photo shoot now. But I didn’t ask.

We went to my office. I had some razor burn so she sent her assistant out to get some cover-up and something called "Tend Skin." She didn’t charge me for either. (I figured, since I’m on Jewcy, I’d mention that fact – I didn’t even have to pay wholesale!) Then Alana asked me to stand on my desk. (Why? Who knows?) Then Alana asked me to sit under my desk. (Ditto, w/r/t my continuing ignorance). But I didn’t ask. I hope the photos look good. She honestly did seem very talented.

Anyway, the article comes out on Tuesday. Again, More Than It Hurts You is no spring chicken, so I’m very grateful that people are still writing about me.

And that’s it: I’m sitting here, still beneath my desk (I thought if I typed this while still under here, I’d get the vibe right); I’m still wearing pancake makeup; I’m still trying not to feel like all this – the photoshoot itself; the posing ("Now try doing angry for me"); even this blogging – makes me somehow a phony. It doesn’t feel like writing fiction, that’s for sure. But it’s all part of the game, and I know I’m lucky to be asked. (So thank you both to Jewcy and to the Village Voice.)

Still, I have to say it all feels weird.

Darin Strauss, author of More Than It Hurts You, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and he’ll be here all week. Stay tuned.

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