Lynn Steger Strong on How Books Can Fail Us

This week on The Maris Review, Lynn Steger Strong joins Maris Kreizman to discuss her new book, Want, out now from Henry Holt.

On how books can fail us:

Maris Kreizman: Towards the end of your novel your heroine says, “I think of all the way books have failed me, all the ways they’re less than what I thought” and I must admit that I burst into tears at that part. Tell me about the ways that books can let people down.

Lynn Steger Strong: I think once you start to look out, which is to say that I feel deeply, and I don’t think I’m understating this, that books saved my life. In a lot of ways other things were very complicated for me for a long time, and books really weren’t. They were this space that I went to and could return to that felt safe in a way a lot of other spaces didn’t. So I had this sort of dogged belief in their power. But then you grow up. In the same way that people learn that their parents aren’t superheroes, I think I gradually realized that books can’t feed my babies and fix all of the broken systems… You have to do more than the reading.

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On the reality of what is attainable:

Lynn Steger Strong: The avenues through which you can have a sustainable life just keep getting tighter and tighter, regardless of the college you went to, regardless of your intelligence, regardless of your ability to work hard… I feel really strongly that above all else that I’m a fiction writer and I don’t think I’m informed enough to make arguments about all of this so much as I think that I’m good at looking at art. So I hope my book says some of that. Just look. These people who you think are X are actually Y, and the people who think are A are actually B. We can have all of these narratives of various experiences, and even I, having written this book, still think “Shouldn’t I be able to afford summer camp?” I know my reality but the narrative with regard to what I might have access to is so deeply embedded in my body that I both keep expecting it and being ashamed and disappointed by the fact that I can’t attain it.

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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.

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