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Tough one. I picked The Queen of Tuesday because I hoped it a) sounded cool, b) was mysterious, c) made sense once you realized the book was about the most famous television star of all time.
The book has tough to name because it's tough to peg: It's a half memoir/half fiction hybrid, about a speculative affair between my grandfather and Lucille Ball.
What's in a name?
Letters, generally.
More serious answer: I wanted to show how much sway Lucille had over America at that time. Her show (which in real-life aired on Monday nights, but in my book -- to show that it was a novel -- ran on Tuesdays) had the country all to itself on that night.
The nation's reservoirs are said to have dipped when her show broke for a commercial. (The whole country, flushing as one). Also, Lucille Ball was kind of a proto-feminist and progressive. She had one of the first famous American interracial marriages, and she fought to get her Latinx husband on primetime TV; she was a secret communist; and she invented the idea of...[read on]
The Page 99 Test: Half a Life.
Q&A with Darin Strauss.
--Marshal Zeringue
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