Darin Strauss

Darin Strauss writes fiction and memoirs that often test the boundary between documented life and imagined possibility. The Queen of Tuesday blends fiction, family history, and biographical material around television pioneer Lucille Ball. The novel begins from a daring premise: Strauss imagines that his grandfather, Isidore, may have had an affair with Ball as her fame and marriage to Desi Arnaz transformed American entertainment. A possible 1949 meeting at Coney Island becomes the basis for its fictionalized portrait. Strauss had already explored personal memory in Half a Life, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. Here he makes uncertainty part of the form, moving between a public icon's carefully maintained image and a grandson's attempt to understand family legend. The Queen of Tuesday shows Darin Strauss treating celebrity history neither as conventional biography nor pure invention, but as material for examining ambition, marriage, memory, and the stories families choose to preserve.