Want

by Lynn Steger Strong

Overview

Named a Best Book of 2020 by Time Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, NPR, Vulture, The New Yorker, and Kirkus

Grappling with motherhood, economic anxiety, rage, and the limits of language, Want is a fiercely personal novel that vibrates with anger, insight, and love.

Elizabeth is tired. Years after coming to New York to try to build a life, she has found herself with two kids, a husband, two jobs, a PhD—and now they’re filing for bankruptcy. As she tries to balance her dream and the impossibility of striving toward it while her work and home lives feel poised to fall apart, she wakes at ungodly hours to run miles by the icy river, struggling to quiet her thoughts.

When she reaches out to Sasha, her long-lost childhood friend, it feels almost harmless—one of those innocuous ruptures that exist online, in texts. But her timing is uncanny. Sasha is facing a crisis, too, and perhaps after years apart, their shared moments of crux can bring them back into each other’s lives.

In Want, Lynn Steger Strong explores the subtle violences enacted on a certain type of woman when she dares to want things—and all the various violences in which she implicates herself as she tries to survive.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250247537
Publisher:	Holt, Henry & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	07/07/2020
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	116,934
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Lynn Steger Strong’s first novel, Hold Still, was released by Liveright/WW Norton in 2016. Her nonfiction has been published by Guernica, Los Angeles Review of Books, Elle.com, Catapult, Lit Hub, and others. She teaches both fiction and non-fiction writing at Columbia University, Fairfield University, and the Pratt Institute.
Lynn Steger Strong’s first novel, Hold Still, was published in 2016. Her nonfiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Guernica, LARB, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. She teaches writing at Catapult and Columbia University.

Editorial Reviews

★ 2020-05-18
A deeply overwhelmed mother navigates the banality, joy, and turmoil of her life.

Strong’s second novel follows Elizabeth, a 34-year-old academic and mother of two, who finds herself living a life she never imagined. Elizabeth, who grew up in a well-off family, now teaches low-income students at a New York City charter school (a job she needs and likes but cannot seem to love) because she cannot find a full-time job in academia. On top of declaring bankruptcy with her husband, Elizabeth finds her day filled to the brim: She runs miles at dawn, raises her children, works multiple jobs, tends to her marriage, placates her cruel parents, tries to make rent, navigates her privilege, and rekindles a friendship with Sasha, her ex–best friend and the most formative relationship of her life. As they start to communicate again, Elizabeth thinks back on their decades-old relationship and where it went wrong. Strong taps into the intensity of female friendships and how overwhelming, all-consuming, and painful they can be: “I’d forget then, on the best days, that we were separate. Our words and wants and limbs would overlap.” Strong writes womanhood with brutal honesty; exhaustion, love, desire, anxiety, and the devastation of unfulfilled expectations permeate every page. At one point, Elizabeth thinks about all the things she wants to confide to Sasha: “I want to tell her that I’m scared I’m too wore out, worn down, that this constant anxious ache that I have now isn’t about my job or kids or all the ways life isn’t what it should be, that maybe it’s just me, it’s most of who I am.” This moment captures the despair and agony of realizing not only how the world has failed you, but how you’ve failed yourself. Strong’s writing consistently distills bitter truths in understated yet penetrating ways.

A wise, unflinching, and compelling novel about womanhood.

Kirkus Reviews

05/04/2020

Strong’s impressive follow-up to Hold Still explores the energy it takes for women to sustain themselves in a world that leaves them feeling “less than, knocked down, not quite in control.” Now living in New York City, Elizabeth and her unnamed husband are “eighties babies, born of plenty, cloistered by whiteness... brought up to think that if we checked off certain boxes we’d be fine.” Elizabeth has a PhD, but tenure-track professorship remains out of reach, and her husband, the first in his family to attend college, once worked for Lehman Brothers and now struggles to get a carpentry business off the ground. Due to their unstable employment and scant insurance coverage for her C-section and root canals, they are deep in debt (“my body almost single-handedly bankrupted us”). As the couple advance through the bankruptcy process, buoyed by their love for their young children and at times each other, Elizabeth becomes caught up in repeating an old pattern with her friend, Sasha, who is anxious about her pregnancy after a previous miscarriage. Strong unpacks the fraught history of Elizabeth and Sasha’s friendship dating back to their teenage years, delivering great insight on how the exhausted women have found themselves wanting—male attention, babies, choices, recognition, respect—as they compromise their dreams in order to survive. This is well worth a look. (July)

Publishers Weekly

"Furious, aching and razor sharp, Want is a beautiful book."
―Emma Cline, NYT bestselling author of The Girls

"A deeply intelligent and sneakily moving novel about having the ground fall away beneath your feet. Strong ingeniously undercuts conventional wisdom about what it means to be a success in this world."
―Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation

"Teacher, mother, best friend, wife and more. Is there any time or space left for Elizabeth outside of these roles? Lynn Steger Strong illustrates the heroic act of one woman trying her best to keep it all together; succeeding and failing and trying again. Want is honest and funny and profoundly moving. I tore through this book in two days and when it was over I wanted to start it again.”
―Victor LaValle, author of The Changeling

"Lynn Steger Strong’s Want is a fierce, funny, and consistently surprising exploration of friendship, bankruptcy, motherhood, and that slippery thing we call privilege. The voice is electric and nuanced; it feels possessed by a rare, inexplicable urgency. It’s less that this novel peels away the surfaces of daily life―school pick-up, subway commutes, vomiting toddlers―to expose the deeper truths dwelling underneath, and more that it exposes the ways those deep truths already saturate every crevice of our day-to-day lives. Once I started reading this book, I kept reading it compulsively―in a kind of fever―and since finishing, I’ve found myself returning frequently to its insights, grateful for their fervor, their complexity, and their grace."
―Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams, The Recovering, and The Gin Closet

“It’s not just the story of what it is to be a mother and wife, a daughter and friend, a citizen and employee―Want is a novel about what it is to be alive right now, one that truly captures the urgency of human thought and feeling.”
―Rumaan Alam, author of Rich and Pretty and That Kind of Mother

"I felt a giddy sort of love for Lynn Steger Strong’s new novel Want. It’s not like anything else: caustic and despairing and sometimes, unexpectedly, laugh out loud funny. Sentence after sentence, this book took my breath away."
―Marcy Dermansky, author of Very Nice and Bad Marie

From the Publisher