On the heels of his National Book Critics Circle Award-winning memoir Half a Life, Darin Strauss, author of the New York Times bestseller Chang & Eng, presents us with a wild and indelible story based on the loves and losses of Lucille Ball, the woman who became Hollywood’s first true female mogul while navigating a tumultuous personal life.
In The Queen of Tuesday, Strauss mixes fact and fiction, memoir and novel, to bring us face-to-face with one of the world’s most remarkable ent...
On the heels of his National Book Critics Circle Award-winning memoir Half a Life, Darin Strauss, author of the New York Times bestseller Chang & Eng, presents us with a wild and indelible story based on the loves and losses of Lucille Ball, the woman who became Hollywood’s first true female mogul while navigating a tumultuous personal life.
In The Queen of Tuesday, Strauss mixes fact and fiction, memoir and novel, to bring us face-to-face with one of the world’s most remarkable entertainers. The novel begins with a daring conceit: that the author’s grandfather, Isidore Strauss, may have enjoyed—and suffered as a result of—a passionate affair with the legendary actress.
As Strauss shows, Lucille is a singular character—the greatest screen idol the world has ever seen, and the most powerful woman in the history of Hollywood. She starred in America’s first big-time interracial marriage. She loved hard. She may or may not have been a Communist. And she more or less single-handedly came up with the modern television business. When she got pregnant, she convinced a network that viewers would accept warmed-over episodes, thus creating the “re-run.”
While making millions laugh on the small screen, in private Lucille struggled. Her partner in that famously “happy marriage” that people tuned into, reliably, week after week, couldn’t stay faithful. And she found it difficult to balance her ever-ascending fame with the demands of being a mother, a creative genius, an entrepreneur, a media tycoon, and, most of all, a symbol.
Did Strauss’s grandfather actually have a relationship with the First Lady of Television? Who’s to say he did, and who’s to say he didn’t? Regardless, The Queen of Tuesday vibrates with Lucy’s inspiring and surprisingly human story at the same time it interrogates celebrity, media, the role of gender, and the manufacturing of glamour, offering a fresh view of a woman America adored, and reminding us all that, sometimes, you have to create your own reality.
Darin Strauss is the author of the bestselling novels Chang & Eng, The Real McCoy, More Than It Hurts You, the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning memoir Half a Life, and a bestselling comic-book series, Olivia Twist. Together, they’ve been New York Times Notable Books and Newsweek, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, Amazon, and NPR Best Books of the Year. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an American Library Award, Strauss has been published in 14 languages and 19 countries. He has appeared on ABC’s Good Morning America and CBS’s The Late Late Show, and has collaborated on screenplays with Gary Oldman and Julie Taymor. Films based on Half a Life and More Than it Hurts You are in progress, and the TV rights to Chang & Eng have been optioned to Ilene Chaiken, a creative force behind The “L” Word, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Empire. Clinical Professor of Fiction in the Graduate Writing Program at New York University, he lives in Brooklyn.
