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1. Flight : a novel LCCN 2022002947 Type of material Book Personal name Strong, Lynn Steger, 1983- author. Main title Flight : a novel / Lynn Steger Strong. Edition First Edition. Published/Produced Boston ; New York : Mariner Books, [2022] Projected pub date 2211 Description 1 online resource ISBN 9780063135178 (ebook) (hardcover) (trade paperback) Item not available at the Library. Why not? 2. Want : a novel LCCN 2019040524 Type of material Book Personal name Strong, Lynn Steger, 1983- author. Main title Want : a novel / Lynn Steger Strong. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York, New York : Henry Holt and Company, 2020. Projected pub date 2007 Description 1 online resource ISBN 9781250247537 (ebook) (hardcover) Item not available at the Library. Why not?

• Entertainment Weekly - https://ew.com/books/lynn-steger-flight-book-preview/

  Want author Lynn Steger Strong teases her next novel Flight for the first time
  May 17, 2021 at 10:00 AM EDT

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  CREDIT: COURTESY LYNN STEGER STRONG
  Last summer, Lynn Steger Strong enraptured readers with her brisk, blunt novel Want. The story of a mother, living in a highly desirable and highly overpriced Brooklyn neighborhood but struggling under the weight of student loans, medical bills, an estranged relationship with her parents, and the existential crises that come with trying to parent and excel in your career exposed the many (many) cracks in the systems we're supposed to rely on. Now, she turns her acerbic analysis onto the multi-narrator family novel in Flight, coming Fall 2022 from William Morrow's Custom House imprint. Strong spoke to EW to exclusively announce the book and tease what audiences can look forward to.

  ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Before we get into Flights, can you sum up for us what your strongest memories are from the publication of Want?

  LYNN STEGER STRONG: I felt really lucky, people were so kind and generous towards the book and that felt cool and exciting. I spent the month of the book's release out in Maine with barely any cell reception, so every once in a while I would get a connection and my phone would go off, which is a little bit what it felt like in general to have a book come out in quarantine.

  What has been so interesting to see is how people come at it from different angles — they read it on their terms and let the book be what they want or needed it to be. It's about capitalism and the broken state of secondary education and health care, but also about friendship and motherhood; people reading it as an argument for democratic socialism is really high on my list of reactions.

  Can you give us the elevator pitch for Flight?

  My very short elevator pitch is that a matriarch dies and a little girl goes missing. My longer version is that a family is trapped in a house, trying to figure out how to love each other in the absence of the one individual who had always shown them how. And a smaller family is also trying to figure out how to love one another. And all of them have to come together and fearfully figure out how to take care of each other when a child disappears.

  What is the inspiration for the title?

  There is a character throughout the book who lives in the barn behind the house as everything is going on, and building an art installation of birds. But beyond that, there is a lot of "flying" — there's a gaggle of children throughout who make-believe flying unicorns, for example. You can insert the Jonathan Franzen joke here, but I've always been particularly stunned by the beauty of the way the birds move in unison, and how that translates to the intuitive nature of functioning as a unit.

  How did the idea for this novel start to form?

  It started after I finished Want and was at a residency where I teach and I had a transcendent experience of reading Ninth Street Women by Mary Gabriel, which is a biography of female painters. I started thinking about visual art and groups of women. And I knew that one of the things I wanted to explore after Want, which was kind of an angry book, was what is on the other side of this anger? When I write I basically take an idea, and the idea is like a ball, and you through it out really far. And through the process of writing, you see if you can get to that idea. Want was about individual shame and failure and success, and I think this book is more about a collective consciousness. There are multiple points of view.

  A lot of the elements of Want were pulled from your own experience; where did you get the inspiration for the people and events in Flight?

  It's all just me [laughs]. I think I'm always pulling from my life, and my obsession as a writer is the ways that we try and fail to love one another. And all the ways that our traumas haunt the way we try to care for other people. I think there are specific ideas in the book about being a parent and a woman, and how they are modeled for us and how we try to push against them — that's what I tried to give the main characters (who are all women).

  I had this exercise I made myself do in writing the book, which is okay now you have to do a draft of the book and you're on Kate's side. Go. I wanted to be on everybody's side, but I also wanted the characters to be petty and small at times, in the way I think all humans are. That was also important to me in Want; the narrator was not always super likable, and I wanted these characters to not always be likable.

  Looking forward to publication, is there anything that you hope will be different this time around?

  What are we supposed to hope for [laughs]? I think Want, parts of its outlook were sort of bleak. And I wrote this book trying to convince myself that some of the feelings I was reaching for still have a place in this world. That those feelings don't have to be schmaltzy but can be real and alive.

• Columbia Journal - http://columbiajournal.org/you-should-be-paying-attention-an-interview-with-lynn-steger-strong/

  You Should Be Paying Attention: An Interview with Lynn Steger Strong
  Kate SullivanJuly 27, 2020
  Kate Sullivan, Social Media Manager for the Columbia Journal, sat down with Lynn Steger Strong to discuss her second novel Want, a book that explores the complexities of motherhood, lost friendship, and the ways in which we live in, and in spite of, broken systems. The protagonist grapples with precarity amidst an aggregation of desires, while Steger Strong’s prose reminds us of language’s limits and the many voids it creates.

  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.

  I loved your book, and it was doubly special having had you as a professor last term. Having never read a book in recent memory where the protagonist is a runner, was very cool. I was wondering how you started writing this novel, and how the project came about in the first place?

  I had a failed book. I wrote a book and it came out and that felt like failing in the ways I think a lot of books, first books, feel like failing to their writers. Then I wrote another book that was supposed to be my big important book that I spent years on and I did research and had charts and graphs on our wall. We sent it out twice over the period of a couple of years and it didn’t sell, and it felt a little like falling off a cliff. But a cool thing about that is then you just do exactly what you want, or that’s what I did, so some of it I think was the energy of that, and sort of being like, okay, I might never have a career, what would I write if I just wrote? I started writing when she sort of leaves work, and I guess this is in some ways connected to not having a career, but like I was thinking a lot about the particular privilege of being able to disappear and nobody knowing, and I think I was always returning to that sort of idea, the way that that is a privilege and that is a power to just sort of, hide in corners or disappear.

  Do you feel like the process of writing this book was different as a result of thinking about writing differently, in what you mentioned as “falling off a cliff?”

  I wrote it very quickly, I wrote the first draft in probably about seven or eight weeks, but it was a really intense, tortuous process for everyone in my family. I got up at three or four every morning. I worked until my kids got up and then I took them to camp, and then I worked until they got home, and then I sort of acknowledged that they existed and then I worked more. I have had stretches of work like that that are intense but never to that extent. I think to some extent, and you know this as my student, I believe that writing is work, I don’t think that it’s magic, but I feel like I was really inside of the energy of the book maybe even more than life for that period of time, and so I needed it to end because I needed to return to my life.

  I wanted to ask about any potential blurred lines between Elizabeth, the protagonist, and your own life,but some of the overlaps I saw there were just that you’re both mothers, runners, and of course, the occupational overlap, and love for Virginia Woolf. Do you consider “Want” to be autofiction? And was there a deliberate process in separating fictional elements from anything that was autobiographical?

  I had a very clear idea in my head both in terms of there were things that I wanted to show, but I would say that what I think it’s my job to do as a writer is to pay as close attention as I can, and then to shape it in ways that help other people pay attention as well. I knew that there were things that I wanted people to pay attention to, in the particular container of a thirty-something white woman who lives in Brooklyn and teaches and has little kids, little girls, was really important to me. I think insofar as I love autofiction but was interested in sort of pushing the idea of autofiction forward. I really love thinking about the shape and structure of novels. Shape and structure was important to me, plot was important to me. I think the container of the character shares attributes with me, but a lot of the concrete action was made up just in service of giving the book movement, and being able to inhabit scene and image instead of just sort of talking about ideas I’d been thinking about for a long time.

  Were some of the books that were mentioned within the physical novel (Gayl Jones’ Corregidora, Marguerite Duras’ The Lover, Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero, to name a few), were those particular literary influences in writing this book or were they deliberate choices for other reasons?

  They’re all sorts of things. I think often the thing that I’m reading is more present to me than the thing that I’m experiencing, so to some extent those are books that have, some of them are just books that have stuck with me, books that I love, some of them are books that I’ve always felt portrayed a feeling or an experience more effectively than I could. I think a lot when I’m teaching and so then it informs my reading which then informs the writing, which is to say I did think a lot about writers that are less well known, I did think a lot about writers that are in translation, and writers that reconsider the way the novel can be used, not just formally, which interests me and which I think is present in the book. But again, some of the writers in the book are also activists, which I find really exciting and interesting. More than anything I wanted the book to be in conversation with other books because I think all books are in conversation with other books. I wanted the vastness and complexity of that conversation to be present, because that’s the part that I think we as writers don’t do as good a job of, right, I feel like when I started writing, I didn’t realize how vast the conversation is, and I did want to take this as an opportunity to just sort of engage with the breadth of ways of approaching the novel and ways of approaching the concept of being a writer.

  Obviously the book wasn’t written during a pandemic, but I think it certainly examines a lot of what has been exposed throughout the year, both pandemic and not, with rising unemployment, lack of access to healthcare, and even in the depiction of Elizebth’s highschool CEO, the line where they say “they like the feel of her,” I think highlights white privilege and I think Elizabeth certainly acknowledges it, and I wanted to ask how if you thought your novel works in conversation with 2020 and with the world right now?

  It’s a complicated question obviously because I have felt for a long time that everything is broken but also that there were threads holding things together, and the fact that the threads have now snapped, does not feel good. I think the idea that the book is in conversation with broken systems and that more people are cognizant of those broken systems, that feels exciting, but the tragedy of those broken systems only feels more present, and to be honest, it’s hard for me right now to not be focused on the tragedy. It’s an interesting question and it feels like I want to say more in terms of ‘it’s the thing that I want the book to force people to look at,’ and I think that I played in the spaces of a lot of different tropes that are also engaging to me, not least like the best friend narrative, or the motherhood narrative, which again, I love and I’m glad to be in those camps, but in some ways I played in those because those women in those books are very safe, and, even in my book, she is mostly safe, but it was important to me to show both someone who was less safe than many, but also still safer than almost everyone being in a space of precarity, which is, I think, proof of just how deeply broken everything has become. Like even this highly educated white lady isn’t safe, and if even this highly educated white lady isn’t safe, you should be paying attention. So in that sense, I’m excited to talk about it if only because I do think there are reads that could miss that.

  I was reading something else that someone wrote about placing your novel within “contemporary female fiction” but I feel like that label doesn’t do your book justice because, some of the associations with what that label might be, I think your book goes way beyond that. Why would something have to just be “contemporary female fiction,” because there’s a woman protagonist.

  And if you play that really fun game of like, “what’s contemporary male fiction.”

  Right, exactly which is the game I started playing.

  The whole canon, you know? Yeah, I think again like, it’s sort of our job to think about the conversation we’re entering into and to think about the one or two ways that we can push it forward. The two things I think I was really interested in, one of which was, and this is totally stolen from Katie Bloom’s review in The Nation, where she was talking about these contemporary female fictions of a certain type, and she said that all of these books engage with anxiety but not with precarity. And I think that was to me the big thing, like no bad shit is going to happen to Elizabeth, she’s not just going to be scared or uncomfortable, that was number one, to actually give her precarity, but then also similarly, I think that there’s this sort of performance of a cognizance of experiences outside of your own, right, like these smart narrators who talk about these broken systems, or these smart narrators who talk about racism, but everyone that they interact with is also rich and white, and you know Elizabeth sort of says this, I think I still grapple with this, like what is the value of your stupid reading and writing and thinking? I’m still not sure, but at least insofar as in my novel, I wanted the character to actually engage with other experiences, not just think and talk about them.

  I keep returning to our class, because I can’t help myself, but in thinking about the anti-social novel that you had us read by Megan O’Grady, there was a line in your book, “we cannot live outside ….” and I think it seemed to be in conversation with the idea the Times article presents, in women clinging to the edge of the map, and to return to the theme of your class last term, “the anti-social novel,” do you feel Want plays with anti-socialness ?

  Didn’t we figure out there’s no real definition of the term? Obviously I made up the class and I actually made up the class when I was writing the book and then through a confluence of circumstances, I didn’t get to teach it until a couple years after I had submitted it. But I think yeah, absolutely, I think one of the things I discovered in talking to you guys and thinking about the books and trying to figure out what the overlaps were, was this idea of the way humans are so doggedly in need of or committed to systems, and that when they leave one system, they then sort of can’t help but enact or create a new one. And then the inevitable difficulties of that, I don’t know it’s interesting because I don’t know how I put Elizabeth in that category. I mean she’s obviously, she and her husband have obviously, I guess it’s privilege again. Being anti-social is an extraordinary privilege, right, being able to leave the system is an extraordinary privilege, and I think even the people who don’t, like Elizabeth has less than a lot of her friends, but she also still is extraordinarily privileged, and I think maybe in that sense like, that is the space that I was trying to inhabit of the anti-social novel that I haven’t seen inhabited before, and maybe also it comes back to the jumping off the cliff idea, like it is really easy to jump off a cliff, if you know there’s a net. And I think in a lot of the anti-social novels, this is such a great question and I haven’t thought about my book in this context but if we track back, most of the characters were rich, and the ones who weren’t had to sort of turn wholly inward, like the ones who weren’t had to sort of destroy themselves from the inside out, which to some extent I think at certain points of the book Elizabeth is doing as well. If you have no agency within the systems, where and how do you enact agency? She enacts it on her body, and she enacts it in her relationships, even when she doesn’t want to.

  In addition to Elizabeth often being unable to express or say things maybe that she wants to be feeling and thinking, or that she is feeling or thinking, the prose mimics that in what we get in naming conventions, and how we never know her husband’s name and she’s not named until page 208. How did you decide to play with language and its omissions, and what you chose to reveal and not reveal?

  I think language is slippery and elastic. On the one hand, I don’t think there’s any perfect word for anything. And to some extent that’s why I think I’m a fiction writer, is because I think scenes get us a lot closer than description or explanation. With regard to the elasticity, I think especially with the husband, I’m interested in the assumptions that we bring to language and the ways that we can’t help but fill words with our own expectations. I think especially with her family, her sort of immediate family, which to me in some ways is the least interesting part of the book because they’re the most solid, those are the people that aren’t really questions in the book. Those are the people that yes, it’s complicated in some ways but that’s her unit, I liked the idea of them not being named because their complexity exists but is not really part of the book. I think as people become named, it becomes this sort of different lift for the writer and the reader, with regard to forming the individual and very specific terms. In regard to naming Elizabeth, I know I’ve said this to you, but one of my favorite versions of novels is that they feel like secret sharing. I wanted this to feel like secret sharing, but I also think naming is an incredibly intimate thing, so I wanted that to be one thing she keeps to herself. And then obviously it was important to me that the person who does name her be the person who named her, which I think is connected to how intimacy has different layers. The person who named her is familiar, it’s where she comes from, and that sort of intimacy is specific and it’s irreplaceable, but it also is not at all the same as the intimacy she has with her friends, or her partner, or anyone else in the book. I wanted that moment to feel really intimate, but I wanted it to feel intimate in a way that’s wholly different from the rest of the book.

  I know the relationship between Sasha and Elizabeth is not one of a queer nature, but being queer myself, I read in some of the lines that there is certainly a possibility for that. And I think the concept of intense friendships between women maybe blur that line at some points, but I was wondering if you invite a queer reading of their relationship and if that was on your mind at all in writing Elizabeth and Sasha.

  Yeah, I just love even talking about language that the term “queer” has come to exist. Just the idea of us exiting normative spaces and reconsidering what experiences can be, just feels so deeply exciting to me, that I hope my work is always engaging with the ways that we are never one thing or another thing. A friend of mine described Sasha and Elizabeth’s relationship as “sex, sort of,” which feels true. Like you say, I absolutely invite that read, absolutely believe that read exists, like the beginning of the book she is looking at her body, and she is not just looking at her body because she wishes it were her body, she admires that body, you know? And I think that the more, and again this is why I think even the concept of queer is so interesting to me, the more that we stretch what can live inside of our relationships and our experiences, the more we acknowledge the complexity of those interactions. I have no doubt that she has moments where she’s attracted to Sasha, I also think that probably both of their relationships, both the language and experience is constricted such that they would never know how to name it or what to do with it, which again, it’s the extraordinary power of naming, because they can’t name it, they will never do it. But, I do think interacting with students, I do think now, so much more often, students are given the opportunity to act on these feelings because language has made space for it.

  There’s a moment early on in the novel when Elizabeth swims out to sea with Sasha and says it’s the time where she feels more sure than any time on land. With right now being a time where some people are seeking that kind of assuredness, the very concept of place, could also be what threatens and disrupts. Is writing and reading a space for you, as an author, when a concrete place like a city, or an ocean, can’t be?

  I think it’s interesting because in some ways they’re opposite experiences, at least for me. Reading is, and it’s funny we could play this game completely, to me reading is very much swimming. To me, it’s sort of giving yourself over, I’m also quite a bad swimmer, as opposed to a painfully competitive one. If I see a dude up ahead when I’m running, I need to pass him for reasons that are not clear to me. But I think with swimming and with reading it’s a sort of giving over and immersing yourself, and insofar as I have no time right now, I think when I read I’m trying to get inside of that and let the anxiousness dissipate. I think to some extent, with writing, I was playing with that idea with Elizabeth insofar as she says “surer than I ever feel on land,” and then she doesn’t swim the entire book. She swims when she’s in Florida, but that’s so complicated. The idea that she is a person who only feels that way in the ocean and then lives her life in a place where there is not an easily accessible ocean, that was on purpose. But I think by contrast the running and also the writing has a lot to do with control. It’s a different experience that you’re trying to conjure, that I would actually argue is much harder to get in any other realm of one’s experience, which is to say that you are in charge of everything, even in the moments when you don’t feel in charge of everything. I will just admit because it feels unfair, that I’ve been doing very little reading and very little writing through the process of the pandemic, but that’s not least because I’m doing a lot of solo parenting. Which is weirdly also a little like swimming in terms of swimming in like a very violent ocean.

• Literary Hub - https://lithub.com/lynn-steger-strong-oh-shit-i-wrote-a-domestic-novel-im-a-woman-what-did-i-do/

  Lynn Steger Strong: “Oh, Shit. I Wrote a Domestic Novel. I’m a Woman. What Did I Do?”
  In Conversation with Brad Listi on Otherppl
  By Otherppl with Brad Listi
  November 9, 2022
  Lynn Steger Strong is the guest. Her new book, Flight, is out now from Mariner Books.

  Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

  From the episode:

  Brad Listi: Another thing that I want to talk about is family, which this book does such a lovely job of rendering. And you’re working in a tradition—there is a tradition of family novels that we could point to. How conscious of this were you when you set out to write? Was this something you knew you were doing, or was it something that occurred to you mid-stream or after the fact?

  Lynn Steger Strong: I guess I was conscious of that. And I think too, I’m of the belief that newness is over. Everything’s been done before. If you think you’re doing something new, chances are you just aren’t reading widely enough. My interest as a writer lies much less on an initial new feeling and much more that book’s live or die in the space of execution. And so, I love family novels.

  Weirdly, you do all these things and people ask you where the book came from, and it could have come from a million different places. I think, in part, it comes from April 2020, when there were all those sirens outside our apartment. I was watching the movie Home for the Holidays with Holly Hunter and Robert Downey, Jr. over and over and over again.

  Brad Listi: And this was in Brooklyn?

  Lynn Steger Strong: Yeah. And I was just like, I want to write a book that feels like this. Because part of the tradition of the family novel is its familiarity. I had a friend who’s not a writer read a pretty early draft of the book, and she’s very sweet and she was like, okay, I don’t know if this is a nice thing to say and kept qualifying, but then she was like, “It felt like like a warm bath.” And I was like, no, no, that’s what I wanted. Which is just to say, I did know the tradition.

  And when I started, I actually was really excited to be a part of it. I think maybe what happened by contrast is that I pulled out of the book and I was like, “Oh, shit, I wrote a domestic novel. I’m a woman. What did I do?” Does this book have any chance at all to be taken seriously as a serious book about what it is to be alive? Or did I fuck myself and I’m going to get a bunch of sweet reviews about this sweet lady who wrote this sweet book about mothers?

  Brad Listi: I’m going to interrupt you and just say absolutely not. Because this book captures that warmth and the messy love. Familial love is always messy love in general. Any kind of close, intimate, loving relationship is going to have so many complexities and so many subterranean twists and turns, and you captured that messiness beautifully. You also are among, I think, the best contemporary writers that I’ve read when it comes to capturing the absurdity of parenthood.

  I’m thinking of the scene in Starbucks with the cake pops in the bathroom, and I’m just like, oh, my god. Anybody who has kids has lived some version of that. So it’s nice to see that. It’s not saccharin, but it also doesn’t shy away from moments that are genuinely sweet, which life has too.

  If somebody’s got a problem with that, I think they need to look inwards. We all have those moments where we get a little sentimental, and there should be room for that too in fiction. And yet, I said to myself aloud as I was reading the back half of the book, “Oh my god, I’m getting a strong Rick Moody The Ice Storm vibe.” I was like, Ice Storm Energy, with the feeling of destabilization. I won’t say anything more because I don’t want to spoil anything, but there’s a real drama to this book. Rumaan Alam says it’s suspenseful. That word matters to me in terms of an appraisal of this book. It would feel incomplete without it.

  *

  Lynn Steger Strong is the author of the novel Flight, available from Mariner Books. Strong’s other books include the novels Want and Hold Still. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, Time, Harper’s Bazaar, Los Angeles Times, The Paris Review, The Cut, New York Magazine, and elsewhere. She teaches writing at Catapult and Columbia University, and in 2022-23, she will be the Visiting Fiction Writer at Bates College.

• The Bookslut - https://www.thebookslut.com/post/in-conversation-with-lynn-steger-strong

  Mel Ann Rosenthal
  Aug 20, 2020
  10 min read

  In Conversation with Lynn Steger Strong

  From October 2018 through September 2019, I was lucky enough to be taught by Lynn in Catapult’s Novel Generator class. It was a year-long intensive in a workshop format where my classmates and I wrote and rewrote our in-progress novels until we completed a final draft. Lynn’s candor was much-appreciated as she let us know what to expect in the near future, doing more edits, finding agents, and beyond. I reached out to her in the spring to see if she’d be interested in sharing more about herself and her process with the audience at The Book Slut, and she said yes. It was lovely being able to reconnect and share in the success of Want.

  A portrait of a woman looking at camera, dark green background.
  Author Lynn Steger Strong - photo by Nina Subin

  Mel Rosenthal: First I want to say thank you again for getting me an advance copy, I was so happy to be an early reader (and interviewer!). When you were my instructor at Catapult we all, even you, were going through such major edits on our novels that it was a thrill to see yours in its nearly finished state. How would you summarize the work you put into your second published novel?

  Lynn Steger Strong: I think, in the way that I think we are always working, even when we aren’t, that summary will inevitably not contain all the ways I think the book came to be. Which maybe sounds more spiritual than I mean it, but I do think this book deals with ideas and concerns I’d been chewing on and re-considering for most of my adult life, and, though the actual drafting took a relatively short period of time, I have since found sentences and scenes that I wrote years ago that managed to sneak their way in. I wrote, though, the first full draft over the period of about two months. I then had some long and fruitful talks with a handful of early readers and then chipped away at the book another three months or so.

  By the time my editor got her hands on it, we went through three pretty intense edits. The first really opened the book up. I had written almost completely in present tense and had given myself the rule of flashing back as little as possible, and, in that first edit, I had to open the book up a little more, give a few more explanations and a little more meat to it. Inevitably, I think, when you start to open those moments up they get a little bit messy, and the next round was a matter of tightening back up.

  The final edit I referred to as my existential edit, which is to say, the project of this book overall was very much to bring this main character to the mat as often and as deliberately as I could. The last letter from my editor was a very short note that basically said, make sure you’re doing that as much as you can. That was the edit that was by far the scariest and, I think, the most effective in making sure the book achieved what it set out to achieve.

  MR: That sounds so intense! How are you holding up now?

  LSS: I feel like there are two questions inside of this, which is to say, as a writer, I feel okay. I’m proud of the book I made and I have been very lucky in its reception as it’s ventured out into the world. As a person, I am very scared and very sad. I think for many of us this is a horrifying and devastating time and I mostly hope we might all find our way safely to some other side.

  MR: Absolutely. Holding onto that hope is so important right now.

  How does your experience teaching influence your writing? Did it spark a lot of inspiration for your main character, Elizabeth? There are such biting remarks in the book about the state of teaching and how, too scared to be penalized by their institutions, teachers might be forced into undermining their students with a lack of trust that the information being taught can be understood. Can you speak to how we as a society can do better by both parties, the teachers and the students to build better curricula?

  LSS: Of course the two are connected in ways the institutions seem largely unwilling to acknowledge. These Vaunted Institutions claim to offer a certain quality of education that inevitably breaks under the pressure of consistently underpaying and undervaluing their workforce. I am an adjunct and I have between three and four jobs each semester. I love my jobs and I work hard at them, but I am nowhere near as good a teacher as I could be if I had the time and space to only have one job; if I didn’t live in a constant state of anxiety over healthcare and whether or not I’ll still have my job next year. This has been the state of higher education for years now, and, while I don’t claim to know much about policy or administration, it feels to me to in many ways be as simple as institutions acknowledging and respecting the lives and needs of their employees, which would almost certainly lead to a better education for their students.

  MR: That makes a lot of sense. It seems like we need more people with experiences like yours at the forefront of these changes that need to be made in higher education and beyond.

  I must say, Want was a treat to read. I sunk into it just as the global pandemic was declared and it proved to be the kind of getaway I needed when I had to turn off my news feeds. The quiet, introspective nature of the main character reminded me so much of Ali Smith and Rachel Cusk. The setup in the flashback of the first couple pages also made me think of Julie Buntin’s Marlena. Did you pull any inspiration from their styles?

  LSS: I’m very glad the book was able to be that for you! I think, in many ways, I was really pushing against the “quietness” of Cusk especially. I think the fact that those books (which I adore) are almost completely internal was something I really wanted to work against. I wanted my character to have a body, to have a job, to be in the world and feel its complicated messy dailiness. On the same token, because my character, like Cusk’s, is a white woman of a certain level of privilege, the impact of her life’s events are purposefully and pointedly blunted in a way that perhaps feels like a type of “quietness.”

  MR: Oh, totally! There was such lovely, condensed storytelling in the flashbacks where Elizabeth recalls her teenage years with her old friend Sasha. When you’re writing how do you decide what to dwell on more deeply and what to summarize in this way? (Looking at page 30 in particular, their senior year.)

  LSS: Those moments too I wanted to be incredibly physical and even sensual. So much of the experience, to me, of being a woman, and especially of being a teenage girl, is in the complexity and messiness, the yearning of the body. Those sections especially I wanted them to feel physical and sensual. I wanted the physical interactions to be short and pointed, such that they might do most of the work of showing what that relationship felt like for both characters.

  MR: You really pulled that off. I really felt that in the scenes of their youth.

  I also, of course, loved how literary Elizabeth is: “There was a time when I thought giving books to other people—showing them their richness, their quiet, secret temporary safety—could be a useful way to spend one’s life.” I kept a running list of the books she read throughout. What were your intentions behind the titles you selected?

  LSS: In part those are all just books I love, books I thought Elizabeth would certainly have read, books that I hoped for my book to be in conversation with. I think all books are in conversation with one another. I also think, for a certain type of reader, it’s possible, in moments for their lived experience to feel less present to them than the scenes in books they’d read. One of the main tensions of the novel is the tension between whatever personal individual sustenance and power books and reading might give and the ways that they might fall short as one attempts to live more fully in the world.

  MR: I think that’s so true of the books I’ve gotten truly lost in.

  Though Elizabeth describes herself and Sasha as so similar, “equally unrelenting, depressive, bookish”, they contrast greatly in their appearances, and so also in how they are perceived by men. How did you make the choice to paint Sasha as a sort of “enhanced” version of Elizabeth, so similar to Elizabeth but more of an extrovert and a flirt? They balance each other so well while they’re together. When was it clear to you while writing that Elizabeth was going to break off and be less dependent on Sasha?

  LSS: They’re breaking off and coming back together was always a key component of the book’s engine for me. In some ways, I was leaning into one of the oldest friendship tropes I know: two girls, one more compelling than the other, but I wanted to push it forward in specific ways that had to do with caretaking and also with all the ways, that though Elizabeth thinks of Sasha’s beauty as a kind of power, she also comes to realize that her own ability to disappear and not be objectified as often is also a type of power; that Sasha has lost as much as she has gained from looking the way that she does, that Elizabeth has a power too, and that sometimes she has deployed it in ways she’s come to regret.

  MR: Elizabeth thinks: “There are so many streets like this, where I have been so many different people. If anyone were to ask me why I can’t leave even as this city is too hard for not-rich people, I would say it’s because I’m too afraid of what would happen to all these different people somewhere else. This is the place where I was formed, long after forming should have happened; it’s the place where no one was looking and I felt allowed.” I absolutely adored that quote. It really spoke to how influential the city is to so many new New Yorkers. What does NYC mean to you?

  LSS: Last night, for the first time in months, I met a friend for a drink and then walked home alone with headphones in. I almost cried from the joy of it. The too hot air, the people outside talking, laughing; the life of it. I can’t afford to live here. I don’t think you need to live in New York to be a writer. We live in New York, like Elizabeth, I guess, because it’s the only place in my whole life that has ever felt like home. We have tried to leave more than once for all the obvious reasons, and yet, each time—and at great expense—we’ve come back. I’m just one person and I make bad choices all the time and this might well be one of them. But I love everything about this city. Our community lives here. All my favorite running routes are here. I might still be pushed out eventually, but it will always be our home.

  MR: That’s so relatable. I’ve never lived in the city myself but I worked there for so long and it grew to feel like a home away from home, somewhere I can go whenever I need some comforting culture, or just to meet my closest friends who do live there.

  You’ve written about the place money has in the lives of artists—which came first, your idea for this book or your desire to call out the way we, as a society, don’t often enough discuss money’s power? Do think the recent Twitter hashtag #PublishingPaidMe can make a difference?

  LSS: I think what we don’t discuss enough is not money’s power, but the shame that people feel when they feel that they don’t have enough. I think people know, or have at least internalized, that money represents a certain kind of value and power to most people, and so, to admit that you don’t have enough, or that what you have is not all you’ve earned yourself, feels scary and shameful. I think any attempt to talk more openly about all the ways that publishing has too often leaned on other people’s money—how often simply as a result of attrition and the fact that good work takes time and space, richer people have a better shot—the better off both the world of publishing and the work that is produced will be.

  MR: Are you familiar with that Carrie Fisher quote from a few years back? “Take your broken heart, make it into art.” Would you give similar advice to artists and writers hoping to deal with their emotions in response to COVID and the protests against police brutality targeting Black Americans? Have you been able to work on any new short or long writing pieces in the last few months?

  LSS: I think you should always be working to use everything that you have, though I’m not sure that’s always so specific as your particular broken heart. I also think that looking too soon or too explicitly at an experience or trauma before having had the time to digest it or to see it in a way that helps others see it anew often doesn’t do the work much good. My advice to writers right now would be to take in as much of it as you can, even and especially when it feels a little painful. You might be years from writing about it, but I have often found, if an experience is one you have something to say about, the sensations that you felt when you were inside of it, will still be in your body when you feel ready to get them down.

  MR: Great advice. It’ll be interesting to see how this shared experience changes the stories that are put out into the world a couple years from now.

  Finally, what was your favorite part of working on this book? If you could say just one thing, provide one piece of truth or encouragement to aspiring authors, what would it be?

  LSS: I wrote this book on the heels of another book that I thought was my Big Important Book that never saw the light of day. Whereas this book was the book I wrote when I’d mostly given up on any idea of a career. This is my fuck it and write exactly what I want book. I think that impulse can be dangerous in lots of ways, but the idea of bounding into spaces that you don’t fully understand but that feel necessary and a little painful and a little scary, all of those feel like necessary feelings, to me, in an attempt to make good work.

  MR: Thank you so much and congratulations on Want!

  LSS: Thanks so much for taking the time with it!

• PEN America website - https://pen.org/the-pen-ten-lynn-steger-strong/

  THE PEN TEN: AN INTERVIEW WITH LYNN STEGER STRONG
  By: Jared Jackson
  July 16, 2020
  The PEN Ten is PEN America’s weekly interview series. This week, Jared Jackson speaks with Lynn Steger Strong, author of Want (Henry Holt and Co., 2020).

  Lynn Steger Strong
  Photo by Nina Subin

  1. What was the first book or piece of writing that had a profound impact on you?
  I read Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse in quick succession my sophomore year of college. I don’t think I breathed the whole time. It felt like suddenly being shown that I was allowed both as a human and a writer, that words and stories could be more even than I had thought they were.

  2. How does your writing navigate truth? What is the relationship between truth and fiction? The thing that feels “true” to me about fiction is that it has no obligation to make an argument. I don’t believe in the “truth” of arguments. They’re too couched in an agenda, too shaded by a subjectivity we can never wholly have access to. (This is not the same, to be clear, as the rightness or morality of certain arguments, which I believe in fully.) But, stories, I would argue, force readers to look and see and come to their own conclusions, to reconsider arguments they might consider predetermined. I’m not sure I believe in any sort of fixed truths, but I think well-shaped fiction can get us closer than most other things. I think it’s an opportunity to pose questions more than answer them. In this context, I think of my job is looking and seeing as well and as broadly as I can, and then shaping those observations in ways that hopefully help readers to look and see as well.

  “The thing that feels ‘true’ to me about fiction is that it has no obligation to make an argument. I don’t believe in the ‘truth’ of arguments. They’re too touched in an agenda, too shaded by a subjectivity we can never wholly have access to. . . But, stories, I would argue, force readers to look and see and come to their own conclusions, to reconsider arguments they might consider predetermined.”

  3. What does your creative process look like? How do you maintain momentum and remain inspired?
  Very early mornings. It started when my kids were babies, and I realized the sort of magic of all the non-time when they—and therefore I—was awake, but no one else was. How secret and special that time felt, similar, I think, to riding a train or walking somewhere—these pockets when you don’t feel obligated to interact or clean the kitchen or listen to the news, and your brain feels looser and more malleable. For years, I wrote on my phone while they were nursing, and then, once they (finally) started sleeping, I just kept that time. I don’t always use it for writing. I use it for running, reading, or staring out the window. My main rule for getting work done is to be merciless in terms of making time to try to do it, but then within that time, to be merciful with regard to how I spend that time.

  4. What is the last book you read? What are you reading next?
  I’m trying to finalize my syllabus for a class I’m teaching on “Unhinged Narrators,” so, I just finished Knut Hamsun’s Hunger and am about to start, on a friend’s recommendation, Tope Folarin’s A Particular Kind of Black Man.

  5. How does your identity shape your writing? Is there such a thing as “the writer’s identity?”
  There’s this great Richard Rodriguez quote from his essay “The Third Man” in which he talks about what he envies most about whiteness is the blankness, the “arrogance and confidence,” to be anything. “I grew up wanting to be white,” he says. “That is, to the extent of wanting to be colorless and to feel complete freedom of movement.” I think about that a lot, both in terms of wanting to consider the experiences of my characters in the context of a larger conversation, but also in terms of being cognizant of all the things I can’t and do not see. A friend of mine said to me a few months ago, “Anyone who thinks any of your characters are anything but a product of a single brain doesn’t understand how writing works.” I don’t think anything I write is not informed by the fact that I move through the world as a woman and as a mother—as a particular individual with a particular set of experiences and encounters and ideas. Perhaps the best advice I’ve ever gotten with regard to writing is to make the thing that only you could make.

  “I don’t think anything I write is not informed by the fact that I move through the world as a woman and as a mother—as a particular individual with a particular set of experiences and encounters and ideas. Perhaps the best advice I’ve ever gotten with regard to writing is to make the thing that only you could make.”

  6. What is the most daring thing you’ve ever put into words? Have you ever written something you wish you could take back?
  I wrote this column for The Guardian about money for a while, and I’m very glad I did it. I think we have to be more open and more honest when talking about money. It’s a lot of what want is about as well. But every time one of the essays went live, I spent most of the day sort of shaky and shame-faced; it felt like I’d done something deeply wrong or reprehensible, which, (1) I think is further to the point of all the ways that the particularly pernicious force of capitalism pervades our bodies long after we reject the premise, and (2) I hope is an argument for the fact that maybe I’d said something worth saying?

  7. What advice do you have for young writers?
  Just keep going. Take risks, get messy. Read and read and read—use that reading to find and create language for what it is you want to make, so that when you make it, as you’re working to make it better, when you start to get feedback, you have a solid enough relationship with it that you can stand up for it and push it further toward being what you want, even if and when others decide that it should be something else.

  8. Which writers working today are you most excited by?
  This feels like cheating, but one of my dearest friends is also one of my favorite writers: Rumaan Alam. It is a sort of specific and extraordinary privilege to get to share work and talk about work with someone who feels like they’re reaching for something similar to what you’re reaching for. I also really love Han Kang, Paul Beatty, Lydia Davis, Deborah Eisenberg, Bryan Washington, Rufi Thorpe, Vigdis Hjorth, and Samantha Hunt.

  “I think what feels so scary right now to so many people, but also like a relief, is that it has become so clear that the idea that most things are ‘earned’ or ‘deserved’ in this country, in either direction, is pretty patently absurd.”

  Lynn Steger Strong - Want9. The title of your new novel is Want. For me, this meaning of “want” is equal to—if not more about—the lack of something, a deficiency, than the desire for something. How did you approach portraying the nuance of the word? How did the narrator’s friendship with another woman allow you to express the exhaustion so rarely afforded to women who appear to have “checked off certain boxes” deemed as indications of success by society?
  I talked a lot with my agent about Joan Silber’s novel Improvement, and how throughout that book, the word just churns and churns in your brain as you interact with different characters and see them muddle through their lives. I love what you say about a lack here, because I think this book is very much about the sort of gradations of wanting and getting, for whom that is allowed, and on what terms and at what cost—the particular frustrations of being told over and over you can and should want, but then being continually shown the opposite.

  Like you say, I’m informed by my identity in ways that I think I still probably don’t wholly understand, but one particular space that interested me here is the type of white woman who is—in so many ways—safe and cosseted, who her whole life has been told she can have and be anything she wants, to follow her dreams, but who has in many ways been sold a faulty set of goods. I think Elizabeth’s friendships, both with Sasha and with the other women in the book, gave me space to show the different ways that those unattainable wants manifest themselves and harden into something else as we grow up.

  10. Your novel feels uncannily timely. More than two-thirds into it, Elizabeth says, “We cannot live outside the systems and the structures, but, it turns out, I cannot live within them anymore either.” In what ways does Elizabeth’s life and struggles reflect the imbalances in our system that have always been present, but have been made more vivid due to the pandemic and social unrest of recent events?
  You know, pre-COVID, there was this string of Goodreads reviews—I know I shouldn’t read them, but I do—in which readers were calling Elizabeth “depressed.” She has struggled with depression in the past, but I would argue what she is, for most of the present action of the novel, is worn down by a system that has created very few avenues through which she might be able to sustain herself. There were these responses to my Guardian column, too, where people would pick out certain admissions: that I feel too tired to take a fifth job, that I choose to live in New York City, to affirm for themselves that my life was my fault and not because of larger structural failures.

  I think both I and Elizabeth are wholly cognizant not only of all the ways we’re culpable in—and embarrassed by—the ways our lives haven’t turned out as we thought that they might, but also of our obscene advantages within these systems. But, I think my goal in both was to show how patently absurd the narrative of “personal responsibility” is. I think what feels so scary right now to so many people, but also like a relief, is that it has become so clear that the idea that most things are “earned” or “deserved” in this country, in either direction, is pretty patently absurd.

  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.

Flight. By Lynn Steger Strong. Nov. 2022. 240p. Mariner, $27.99 (9780063135147); e-book, $14.99 (9780063135178).

Siblings Martin, Henry, and Kate are facing their first Christmas since their mother's death. It will be the first Christmas that they and their respective spouses and children won't gather in their mothers Florida house, the first that won't bind them all together. At least not physically. In their mother's absence, old resentments, left unresolved, bubble to the surface, and the siblings clash over what to do with their mother's house, the only inheritance she left. It takes an unexpected crisis involving a local mother and her young daughter to force the family back together and goad them into discerning what matters most in their lives. Strong (Want, 2020) knows just how to write a quietly emotional novel. Her characters feel both familiar and unique, and she is skilled at creating subtly devastating moments mixed with hope and tenderness. Written during a time of intense isolation, Flight reminds us that there is power in community, family, and those special times in which we don't have to do anything but be human.--Enobong Tommelleo

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 American Library Association
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Tommelleo, Enobong. "Flight." Booklist, vol. 119, no. 3, 1 Oct. 2022, p. 23. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A722294475/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=122af56b. Accessed 12 Dec. 2022.

Strong, Lynn Steger FLIGHT Mariner Books (Fiction None) $27.99 11, 8 ISBN: 978-0-06-313514-7

Three siblings bring their families together to celebrate the first Christmas after their mother's death.

When Helen, their strong, opinionated, bighearted mother, dies suddenly, siblings Henry, Kate, and Martin and their spouses are left unmoored by her absence. Gathering at Henry and Alice's home in upstate New York, the family hopes to keep Helen's traditions alive while navigating holiday stress, interpersonal drama, and the unsettled nature of their inheritance: their childhood home in Florida. The house, however, is not the only tension within the group. Henry, an artist, spends long days constructing a flock of clay birds and fretting over climate change, while Alice, a social worker, ruminates on their childless life after years of fertility treatments. Struggling with their differing opinions about ambition and parenting, Martin and Tess live in New York City with their two kids. Kate and Josh, who have found themselves on the wrong end of bad financial investments, hope to move into Helen's house with their three children. Despite being set over just three days, Strong's book manages to distill the essences of not only the characters, but of their decades of shared history and the complicated, complex relationships among them. Above all else, the family loved Helen, and in the wake of her death, they must navigate the new dynamic and learn how to love one another again. Across town, Quinn and her daughter, Madeleine--Alice's clients--are relearning how to be a family, too, after Quinn temporarily lost custody of the girl. When Madeleine goes missing, the siblings spring into action to find her--and, in the process, begin to gain perspective about their own lives and relationships. With deft, discerning prose, Strong writes beautifully about mothers and the struggles, fears, and joys of motherhood. At one point, Kate confesses the depth of her grief to Tess: "But she's the only person in the world who ever saw me the way she saw me, who loved me like that, who remembered me as all the things I'd ever been and also thought of me as all the things she still thought I might become." As the novel comes to a close, Strong offers moments of connection among the family members that feel genuine and earned.

A quiet domestic novel that soars.

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"Strong, Lynn Steger: FLIGHT." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2022, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A713722735/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=5377e96f. Accessed 12 Dec. 2022.

Lynn Steger Strong. Harper, $27.99 (240p) ISBN 978-0-06-313514-7

Three siblings gather with their spouses and children for a fraught Christmas in Strong's delicate latest (after Want). Martin, the eldest, is a disgraced college professor married to ruthless lawyer Tess. Henry is an artist married to artist turned social worker Alice. Kate, the youngest, is a stay-at-home mom married to the useless Josh, who has recently come to the end of a once considerable inheritance. Everyone gathers at Henry and Alice's house in upstate New York; it's their first Christmas together since their mother, Helen, died eight months earlier. Tensions rise: Kate wants to live in Helen's house in Florida until her kids are off to college, but she needs her brothers to agree. Henry and Alice can't have kids; the other two families are knee-deep in child-rearing, and, meanwhile, Alice is inappropriately attached to a child named Maddie, one of her clients. A disappearance midway through amplifies the plot, but the theme of grief takes center stage, as Helen's memory permeates the gathering. Strong is adept at characrerizing this loss in all its manifestations, and in rendering the challenges inherent in three families trying to celebrate together; upon arrival, Tess "wishes this visit were over." Of course, the drama and fully formed characters make readers feel otherwise. Once again, Strong demonstrates her talents for perception and nuance. Agent: Sarah Bowlin, Aevitas Creative Management. (Nov.)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 PWxyz, LLC
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"Flight." Publishers Weekly, vol. 269, no. 33, 8 Aug. 2022, p. 40. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A715674252/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1310d180. Accessed 12 Dec. 2022.

Byline: Chris Vognar, Special to USA TODAY

Close quarters have a way of ratcheting up drama, especially when the people contained know each other's pressure points and they've had years to nurse resentments and gauge each other's strengths, weaknesses and personalities. The siblings and spouses at the core of Lynn Steger Strong's new novel "Flight" (Mariner, 240 pp., ***1/2, out now) all have endured their share of disappointment. Now they're gathered for Christmas in upstate New York environs as chilly as their own interactions. Hanging over their heads, and pushing them deeper into acrimony, is grief.

Henry, Martin and Kate have suddenly lost their mother to a stroke. Helen was a mighty presence not just to her adult children but also to their spouses, Alice, Tess and Josh. The six would usually gather for the holidays at Helen's Florida home. Instead, they're in the cold, at Henry and Alice's place, figuring out how to sell that home, if to sell it, and who will benefit most from these next steps. Kate wants to move in, her emotional attachment to the family home overwhelms her need for money. The others would like to cash in. They do get around to discussing these matters, but mostly the business questions remain part of the subtext, bubbling beneath the surface, the largely unspoken tension fueling quiet animosity.

Strong bores in on each character, each couple, with acute emotional intelligence, crafting a chamber play atmosphere in the vein of Henrik Ibsen or Ingmar Bergman. Once we figure out who's who, who's married to whom and which kids belong to which couple, the character arcs begin to intersect and the sketches give way to frescoes. "Flight" doesn't just juggle the interior lives of six protagonists with great dexterity; it also carefully delineates who these people are to each other, and where anger and jealousy might clip the wings of their better angels.

Tess, for instance, can't stand Josh, Kate's callow, unfocused husband. Henry, an environmental artist, is wounded by his wife Alice's decision to walk away from her own art in favor of a career in social work. Alice, who can't have children of her own, obsesses over Maddie, the daughter of her client Quinn, a recovering heroin addict whose own mother is useless. It's a tangled web, but Strong unravels it with skill and empathy.

It's also a reminder of how the loss of one person can scramble the lives of everyone that person touched. The matriarch Helen weaves in and out of "Flight" in the characters' memories, a presence defined by absence. When she was alive, this wobbly family had structure and ballast. They may have sniped and fought, but they had a place to stand when they were finished. Without her, life makes little sense. All of the old wounds are reopened. Buried grudges reemerge. Helen, soulful, practical and nurturing, was the family's glue. When she's gone, the structure crumbles.

"Flight" sweeps forward in a rich flurry of details: a fallen gingerbread house, a game of Canasta, a furtive sexual encounter. Tightly plotted and vividly rendered, it brings to mind Leo Tolstoy's adage from "Anna Karenina," about how each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Of course, beneath the unhappiness, hopefully, there is love. That's here, too. It's why they fight in the first place. You just have to wipe away a lot of frost to get there.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 USA Today
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Vognar, Chris. "Grief and loss can alter a 'Flight' pattern." USA Today, 14 Nov. 2022, p. 04D. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A726516267/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a0daa52f. Accessed 12 Dec. 2022.

Byline: Pete Tosiello

Want

By Lynn Steger Strong

Henry Holt. 224 pp. $25.99

---

"Want" is, to the credit of author Lynn Steger Strong, a forerunner in the genre of anti-white-savior novels. Its narrator and protagonist, a white teacher at an underfunded Manhattan charter school, harbors no illusions about her ability to materially improve the lives of her black and brown students. As an educator she vacillates between a lenient paternalism and cynical disregard, renouncing the school's harsh conduct policies while frequently calling in sick to spend time with her own small children. "They can't see and don't seem to want to see all the ways their good intentions aren't worth much," she remarks of her white colleagues. Readers seeking a syrupy redemption tale like "Dangerous Minds" or "Freedom Writers" should look elsewhere, and also get a clue.

Yet the narrator's unfulfilling day job serves largely as context for a drifting parable on the gradations of privilege. The core of "Want" is a parasitic relationship slowly unveiled via flashbacks. The narrator (who, like most of the novel's characters, remains nameless for almost the entire book) is racked with guilt over her estrangement from a childhood friend, stalking her on social media and sending late-night text missives begging for reconciliation. Outside of work, the narrator maintains a part-time adjunct role at a prestigious university; she and her husband, an investment banker turned carpenter, are approaching bankruptcy and collapsing under the obligation of tending to children in a cramped apartment.

"Want" hastily grapples with a litany of contemporary social issues, briefly alighting upon gentrification, infantilizing workplace culture and the anonymity of urban life. Strong evokes digital relationships with keen precision, and there's a well-conceived #MeToo subplot that nevertheless feels a bit shoehorned. The classroom scenes, while periodically hampered by hackneyed dialogue about dress codes and black women's hair, derive incisive commentary from a self-conscious white gaze. The charter school's focus on discipline and test scores reinforces an oppressive ruling class to which the narrator, grudgingly, belongs. She grades on a scale and buys lunch for her neediest students, the reflexive indulgence a function of both pity and lowered expectations.

To Strong's narrator, public service and comradeship are manifestations of narcissism, even motherhood a means of assuming agency otherwise denied women. Considering her ruined adolescent friendship, she realizes, "I like being needed, giving, but not so close that I can't run away." When she finally quits her job at the charter school, it's "because I love my students but not as much as I wish I loved them, not enough to work harder and be better." Entitlement undergirds her every rationale: She bristles when confronted with her husband's rich clients, and doggedly pursues academic work as tribute to years spent studying literature at elite institutions.

Strong's flat affect is reminiscent of Halle Butler and Catherine Lacey. The prose begs for attention, then shies away in shame and humility. "We had principles or something, made up almost wholly out of things we knew we didn't want to be or have a part in more than any concrete plans for what we'd be instead," the narrator reflects on her and her husband's career paths. There's an awareness of the privilege baked into this ambivalence, as well as in the deadened, overprescribed city they occupy. While the abundance of literary allusions can seem like scaffolding for a skimpy plot, the narrator's obsession with highfalutin European fiction underscores the drudgery she perceives in her day-to-day life.

Still, an anti-white-savior novel isn't the same as an anti-racist one, just as acknowledgment of privilege isn't synonymous with its rejection. Too often, "Want" feels like a study in allyship fatigue, the systemic inequities suffered by its black and brown characters ceding emotional territory to the domestic drama of their white counterparts. Strong writes convincingly of the desiccated American Dream, the hand-to-mouth existence of young adults in the recession's shadow, but "Want" finds a white woman cruising the thoroughfares of black trauma before retreating to gentrified Brooklyn with a loan from her parents.

Recent novels by Danzy Senna and Kiley Reid have explored similarly liberal, rarefied urban precincts, featuring female protagonists reckoning with disparities in racial and socioeconomic privilege. In Reid and Senna's books, it's impossible to reduce race to a matter of subtext, and while various perspectives are incorporated, the emotional burdens are borne by the most persecuted. In Strong's case, some of her book's failure can be ascribed to the glacial pace of publishing - if nothing else, "Want" would have been far more resonant had it arrived a year ago. But as with any social novel, urgency is paramount.

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Tosiello is a writer and critic based in New York.

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Tosiello, Pete. "Book World: In Lynn Steger Strong's 'Want,' a woman collapses under the obligations of modern life." Washington Post, 10 July 2020. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A629074857/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=aaa8e7f5. Accessed 12 Dec. 2022.

Want. By Lynn Steger Strong. July 2020. 224p. Holt, $25.99 (9781250247544).

From the outside, it looks like Elizabeth has everything she could ever need. A loving husband, two beautiful daughters, and a stable job. But what isn't seen is that she is working two jobs, she and her husband are filing for bankruptcy, and her mother keeps hinting that Elizabeth is unfit to look after her children and they might be taken away. Elizabeth tells herself that reaching out to her old friend Sasha over Instagram is an innocent move, but the timing brings Sasha back in her life at a moment of mutual crisis. Strong (HoldStill, 2016) has an uncanny way of pulling the reader into the heart of her narrative and creating an intimate portrayal of relationships that are fractured but necessary. Her skill at depicting the inner workings of a frustrated housewife will appeal to lovers of Mrs Dalloway (2002) and Ducks, Newburyport (2019). Want is a surprisingly moving novel that will have you dabbing away at your eyes and swallowing that lump in your throat.--Enobong Tommelleo

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 American Library Association
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Tommelleo, Enobong. "Want." Booklist, vol. 116, no. 19-20, 1 June 2020, p. 39. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A628068804/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=fbbac4d3. Accessed 12 Dec. 2022.

Strong, Lynn Steger WANT Henry Holt (Fiction None) $25.99 7, 7 ISBN: 978-1-250-24753-7

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.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Strong, Lynn Steger: WANT." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2020, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A625183284/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=fbe8d615. Accessed 12 Dec. 2022.

Want

Lynn Steger Strong. Holt, $25.99 (224p)

ISBN 978-1-250-24754-4

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 husba?d are "eighties babies, ?orn of plenty, ?loistered by whiteness ... brought up to think that if we checked off certain boxes we'd be fine." Elizabeth has a PhD, but tenuretrack 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 ?or 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)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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"Want." Publishers Weekly, vol. 267, no. 18, 4 May 2020, pp. 34+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A624293973/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d603c6ba. Accessed 12 Dec. 2022.

Tommelleo, Enobong. "Flight." Booklist, vol. 119, no. 3, 1 Oct. 2022, p. 23. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A722294475/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=122af56b. Accessed 12 Dec. 2022. "Strong, Lynn Steger: FLIGHT." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2022, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A713722735/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=5377e96f. Accessed 12 Dec. 2022. "Flight." Publishers Weekly, vol. 269, no. 33, 8 Aug. 2022, p. 40. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A715674252/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1310d180. Accessed 12 Dec. 2022. Vognar, Chris. "Grief and loss can alter a 'Flight' pattern." USA Today, 14 Nov. 2022, p. 04D. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A726516267/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a0daa52f. Accessed 12 Dec. 2022. Tosiello, Pete. "Book World: In Lynn Steger Strong's 'Want,' a woman collapses under the obligations of modern life." Washington Post, 10 July 2020. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A629074857/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=aaa8e7f5. Accessed 12 Dec. 2022. Tommelleo, Enobong. "Want." Booklist, vol. 116, no. 19-20, 1 June 2020, p. 39. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A628068804/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=fbbac4d3. Accessed 12 Dec. 2022. "Strong, Lynn Steger: WANT." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2020, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A625183284/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=fbe8d615. Accessed 12 Dec. 2022. "Want." Publishers Weekly, vol. 267, no. 18, 4 May 2020, pp. 34+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A624293973/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d603c6ba. Accessed 12 Dec. 2022.

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