Darin Strauss: Beyond Biography

“In families, at least in families like mine, a fact is interesting or useful only if it’s been encrusted into myth,” Darin Strauss writes in the afterword to his latest novel, The Queen of Tuesday. “Strauss family memories are dunked in legend; my relatives make fanciful splashes.” Perhaps coming from such a family emboldened Strauss to imagine an affair between his grandfather, Isidore Strauss, and one of the most iconic actresses of all time—a woman who helped define the sitcom and insisted on showing both her interracial marriage and pregnant body on television: Lucille Ball. In the opening chapter, Isidore, a married man who works in real estate but has always wanted to be a writer, meets Lucille at a party thrown by Fred Trump on Coney Island in 1949. He is so enamored with her that he “almost has the sense that his touch gave Lucille her color, that he is part of the glamour.” Loving a star gives his life a reflected glow. Years later as he’s dying, Isidore reflects on how Lucille helped shape him: “the time he spent haunted by her gave his life, in his eyes, a heroic dimension.”

Strauss has written about celebrities before. His first novel, , imagined the lives of Chang and Eng Bunker, conjoined twins who were born in Thailand and became famous in America by performing in circus acts. In addition to two other novels, Strauss wrote , a memoir that won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In , Strauss blends fiction and the truth in an attempt to understand his own grandparents