I’ve had this memoir on my to-read shelf for far too long; I think someone gave it to me or I picked it up at a book sale. Still, I remember Darin Strauss telling a version of this story on This American Life a while ago—how one day near the end of his senior year of high school, he was driving some of his friends to play mini-golf and he struck and killed a girl on a bicycle. Darin knew this girl, Celine Zilke, because […]
Chang and Eng by Darin Strauss
Darin Strauss states right off the bat that his novel, Chang and Eng, is just that: a novel. He has taken real historical events: the birth of the conjoined twins in Siam, their kidnapping by the king, their return to their family only to be sold to an American entrepreneur, their gradual retirement from the “freak show” life and subsequent marriage to two sisters in North Carolina, followed by dozens of children and decades of sadness; he takes all this and weaves a narrative around it […]