Publisher: Henry Holt & Co. Pages: 209 Year Published: 2020
Monotony. Mundane. Ordinary. Repetitive. Depression. Anxiety. Existence—all these words come to mind while reading Want by Lynn Steger Strong. On the surface, Want is a tale of womanhood, motherhood, and friendship. It interrogates how each of these things manifests in a woman’s lives, subverting expectation with reality. Strong’s ability to dig into the daily life of a thirty-something mother living in Brooklyn results in a deeply intimate, bordering invasive exploration of guilt, happiness, and loss.
Synopsis: “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.” — Goodreads
In under 300 pages, Strong is able to cultivate a life that feels supremely real, relatable in discomforting ways, and an unapologetic look at examining one’s life and feeling it comes up short for what they envisioned. There were moments when I felt as if I was invading someone’s deepest thoughts—as if I was sitting on a Subway and could read the resigned-looking mid-thirties woman’s thoughts as she stared at the ceiling.
Elizabeth decides to reach out to Sasha, her best friend from childhood who she once loved as family, but lost through a falling-out created by too much pressure. The pressure, Strong seems to write, was created almost by too much familiarity–they had seen each other through so much it was impossible for the them to stay friends. Elizabeth’s reference for Sasha now comes through social media profiles, which Elizabeth checks religiously, hoping one day refreshing the page will lead to some epiphany and bring them back together. After gathering the courage to reach out, Elizabeth finds Sasha similarly situated to her, in crisis.
The examination of Sasha and Elizabeth’s bond speaks to the complexity of female friendship — where it rises up and fulfills and where is bows and depletes. Marriage and motherhood are explored with an unfiltered honesty that may be relatable or not. For those who can’t relate, I think this novel may feel too dark and unhappy. It is character-driven to its core so do not come for plot.
This novel bleeds literary hues from the explanations of the rote details of Elizabeth’s life to the suffocating rawness of Elizabeth’s admissions regarding her marriage and children, to the books she reads on a bench in a park while escaping her responsibilities.
I enjoyed this novel and found the writing stunning. I may re-read it again in the future as I think it is one I will get different understanding from each time I revisit it.
Have you read it?
Read It Like Rory 