"If you don’t belong to a book club," Ron Charles wrote in The Washington Post last week, "Darin Strauss’s bitter and brilliant new novel is reason enough to start one." The novel – Strauss’s third – marks a departure from the author’s previous books, both of which were (somewhat incidentally) historical fiction. More Than It Hurts You sets us in über-modern Long Island, a place where George Clooney, Austin Powers, and "Everybody Loves Raymond" all figure into the collective consciousness (while Fitzgerald and Tolstoy hide in the shadows).
The book finds its thematic center in a rare disease called Munchausen by Proxy, in which a mother will harm her child to get attention for herself. Playing out the drama are three principal characters: Dori Goldin, the young mother accused of Munchausen; her unknowing husband Josh; and Dr. Darlene Stokes, an African American physician who suspects foul play when Dori brings her infant into the ER.
As their lives tangle in the courtroom and in the press, morals are trumped by flashy headlines, and relationships become so clouded that Josh doesn’t know whether to trust the doctor or his wife. Before long, More Than It Hurts You transcends its storyline, as the syndrome becomes symptomatic of something larger – America’s masochistic obsession with attention in general, and the ramifications thereof.
The Rake: All your novels have a vital thematic resonance to them. In Chang and Eng, for example, Eng wants to physically detach himself from his brother; meanwhile it’s set during the American Civil War – two halves of the same country with one wanting to secede. More Than it Hurts You contains several of these resonant components…Are these ideas you develop before you start, or do they progress as you write?
Strauss: I just sort of write, and then figure out what the book’s about. Typically I write a hundred pages, and then see what I’ve got, and throw out stuff that’s not useful. With this one, I was just grabbed by the story of Munchausen by Proxy. My first two books I just sort of ended up with historical fiction – I wasn’t planning to be a historical fiction author, though. I was just going after stories that could engage me for three hundred pages, for three years.
If you pick a rich subject matter, the themes figure themselves out. You find resonances in the book you hadn’t planned on, and then in the second or third draft you can eke them out. Otherwise, if you try to plan them all out beforehand, you can seem like you’re theme-mongering.
The Rake: What’s perhaps most remarkable about More Than It Hurts You – what a lot of critics are praising it for – is its mashing together of both highbrow and lowbrow styles. Was that your intent from the get-go?
Strauss: I wanted to set out to prove that you could write a literary novel that’s also a page-turner. I didn’t want to make it a cheesy genre book, but you know, it can be literary and an enjoyable read at the same time. I remember this quote from Updike, where he said that, ever since Melville, writing’s been broken down into two camps. There’s the Dreiser camp, which has the plots, and there’s the Henry James camp, with the finely wrought prose, and Melville kind of joined those two streams, but nobody else really has since then. I was thinking a lot about that.
Also, I was thinking a lot about Updike when I was writing this. I wanted to make it kind of like the Rabbit books, where you have a theme, or a hook, that keeps popping up. Like the second Rabbit book – Rabbit Redux – has the moon landing as this big news story, but Updike just uses that as a platform to study what’s going on in America. That’s what I was trying to do: To use this kind of page-turner-y condition – Munchausen – because it’s a standard story of a child in jeopardy.
But then also it says a lot of interesting things about our culture, like about what people will do just to get attention. Munchausen really only happens in rich countries, like the U.S. and the U.K., and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these are the countries with the ridiculous reality TV shows. And so I wanted to use that as the engine of the book. But I also wanted to examine bigger subjects of America like gender and race and class. Then I thought it would be interesting if the doctor was black and the family was white. I thought it would be interesting if the family went to the press, and the doctor couldn’t defend herself. And that’s when it started drawing me in.
The Rake: The most apparent theme of the book is that of acting versus living, and I wonder if you’d speak a little bit about that, in terms of how you see it in the real world.
Strauss: It’s just the culture now. I tried to be careful about not overwriting the point, but I wanted it in there. It was more of a vague idea than something I wanted to hit people over the head with. I remember this line from Saul Bellow, who said that it’s better for a writer to have a vague idea than a fully formed one.
But yeah, I kind of thought that’s the way we go through life now, with crying for attention the way Dori does, and the whole reality TV culture, and always thinking you’re acting in some movie that other people are watching.
The Rake: With all the pop-culture references – George Clooney, Kanye West, "Everybody Loves Raymond" – your intent was clearly to make this book as current as it could possibly be. Some of the observations, though, have turned out to be kind of prescient.
Strauss: A couple reviewers have said that the character of Darlene Stokes personifies both Barack Obama’s campaign and Hillary Clinton’s campaign, because it deals with race and gender. So I got kind of lucky that this presidential season happened when the book was coming out. And in the novel Darlene is attacked for some group she may or may not have belonged to in college – and I saw something recently where people were going after Michele Obama for some African American organization she belonged to in college. And the Reverend Wright stuff reminded me of the way, in the book, they go after Darlene for having a father who’s got a shady past. So it’s been very interesting to watch all that play out.
As I wrote the book, I felt these things bubbling under the surface in America, but by the time the book came out, they weren’t under the surface anymore. I turned it in before Obama was even ahead in the polls – he had actually just announced he was running.
And I also wrote the media stuff before the Duke lacrosse case, which my wife, a journalist for Newsweek, covered. I went with her to a lot of TV things, and I got to see backstage how the race issue plays out in the press, which was interesting because it was exactly what I was writing about at the time. It was gratifying – I felt like I got it right.
The Rake: And then there have been coincidences within your personal life, too.
Strauss: There are a number of coincidences. I started writing this book four years ago, and I didn’t know I was even going to have kids. And Zach, the child in the book, is eight months old when the story starts, and my kids were eight months when it came out.
The Rake: Oooooooooooh…
Strauss: Ha. Yeah — and I wrote a book about twins and now I have twins…And our twins were premature, so I had to read the proofs of the book in the baby ICU. So I’m reading this chapter about the hospital, while I’m in the hospital, and that was very weird, because I was reading a description of a beeping hospital room filled with babies, and there I was sitting in a beeping hospital room filled with babies, and that was really just kind of incredible.
[For a continuation of this interview, click here to see The Rake‘s "Cracking Spines" blog]
Darin Strauss is the author of the international bestseller Chang and Eng and the New York Times Notable Book The Real McCoy. His work has been translated into fourteen languages. The recipient of a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction writing, he lives in Brooklyn, and teaches writing at New York University.
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