Want: A Novel

Written by Lynn Steger Strong

Narrated by Andi Arndt

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, 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brilliance Audio
• Release date: Jul 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781799767671

Lynn Steger Strong

Lynn Steger Strong is the author of 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.

Reviews for Want

[proustitute_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Lynn Steger Strong's Want reads like a highly personal confession of various wants: the want of money and stability in one’s life and career; the want of providing more stability for one’s children, as well as support—emotional, financial, and otherwise—for one’s spouse; and also the want of creating lasting ties and friendships amid a world where technology has made us feel that people are closer, and yet has instead created gaps and chasms among people, even, in the narrator’s case here, her oldest friend, Sasha.

The narrator of Want comes from a socioeconomically privileged background, with an Ivy League doctoral education to boot (Columbia is never named, but hinted at). With a husband following his fantasy of a dream job and two children to provide for, Steger Strong’s novel charts what it’s like to work at a charter high school in the Bronx—where the students are cattle-prodded into performing high on standardized testing rather than offered actual instruction or one-on-one time that would actually serve them—and also catalogues the increasing adjunctification of higher education in America. For those over-educated living in New York City, this is often paired with being over-worked and under-paid; this is the case of Steger Strong’s narrator in Want, and we witness how she attempts to balance her several jobs, declaring bankruptcy despite working nonstop, being a parent to her children and as much of a supportive wife to her husband as possible, all the while fantasizing about a friendship that fell off the tracks a decade ago—one that is only really continued on social media, in fits and starts.

There are a lot of interesting passages and sequences to mull over in Want, and the books the narrator teaches to her undergrads at night are both resonant of her own prose and also familiarly savory to fans of literary and translated fiction. There are echoes of Rachel Cusk here, too, while Steger Strong maintains her own voice: never once fearful of admitting privilege and its loss for her narrator, and never scared to shows the flaws in modern life in terms of how it affects family, finances, mental health, and one’s personal relations.

While there are many quotes I would love to pluck from the book, I’m respecting the do-not-quote mandate of the ARC I read—kindly provided by Henry Holt and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review—and urge those who are all too familiar with the over-educated and under-paid gap in America right now, especially those in education, to read this book when it’s published in July 2020.

4.5 stars

[froxgirl · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This gentle novel puts the spotlight on a family in NYC that just cannot cut it financially nor stay afloat. Elizabeth, mother of two, drifts back into daydreaming about her best friend Sasha, with whom she has only sporadic contact since she married, and spies on via Facebook. There are intense lookbacks to Elizabeth and Sasha's girlhoods, their travels, boyfriends, suicide attempts, miscarriages, and abortions, and Elizabeth's realization that there's a missing piece in her puzzle and that Sasha is that piece. Elizabeth and her husband have an affectionate and supportive relationship, but with working three jobs as an adjunct and getting too emotionally involved with her students, she is exhausted and demoralized by her wealthy distant parents threatening to break up her family to save their granddaughters from penury. Her husband, a woodworker, is also struggling in his career, yet they stay intact despite the financial pressures of bankruptcy. There's no miracle or magic wand here - just a frank tale of modern day struggle and perseverance.Quote: “My parents came from nothing and worked hard for their money, which means they thought anyone who was not also successful was not successful because they did not work hard enough. Love was wrapped up tight with winning and one’s value was variable and contingent and could fall short at any point.”

[brookiexlicious · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

WOW. Just WOW! This book was simply intoxicating and left me almost speechless. It’s one I want to reread almost immediately so I can once again bask in the wonder of its words. I’ve already ordered a copy of my own so this can sit with pride on my bookshelf along with the rest of my collection. saw so much of myself in Elizabeth that at times I had to put the book down for a moment. It’s bewildering and yet almost satisfying to see what you felt were unique thoughts and feelings spoken by a fictional character. The reveal of what untethered Elizabeth’s and Sasha’s friendship caused me to deeply reflect on my own culpability in strained friendships like no book or movie has ever done before. This book is a rich and honest insight into the mind of women. It explores the wanting in our lives-the things we want but can’t have, the things we want that don’t want us, wanting what our friends and parents have, not wanting the things we’re told we should want. There were so many turns of phrase and character descriptions that I reread several times, wanting to keep it to myself that much longer. Never have I read a book that explored the issues of friendship, motherhood, and marriage like this one.

[nyiper · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Yes, I was exhausted with Elizabeth's running schedule! This was quite a book and I was struggling a little to see where it was going because everything seemed just too hard---bankruptcy? Major job problems? Family relationship problems? a particular upsetting problem with a long time friend, Sasha. But it also seemed to be a picture of how so many people are living their lives...just not quite making it in this world.....a constant, overwhelmingness of living life. How does one cope with that? Perhaps frighteningly realistic but definitely readable.

[sunshine608 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book ( and the writing) is so real and raw it felt like it was coming from my own head. I don't share much in common with the story's protagonist, Elizabeth but her story felt so achingly familiar that I could not put it down. This story keeps you engaged with a story that almost reads like a memoir in its honesty and the depth to which the characters are introduced and we get to know them through the eyes of Elizabeth. So many moments stand out to me. I really enjoyed every aspect of this book. This is one of the books where I know I will find even more nuances and truths on a re-read. Truly excellent writing and a story.

Thanks to #netgalley for the #arc I received of this title.

[carriewuj · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Amazing writing. I flagged lots of passages because I was so wowed by Strong's writing. As a narrative, it is more reflective than action-packed as much of the events have more of a psychological effect. Told in first person by Elizabeth, the protagonist, the main thing that comes across is her exhaustion. She and her husband have the misfortune of bad timing - they graduated top tier universities on the cusp of the 2008 bubble burst and live in NYC, have 2 young daughters, enormous debt, multiple jobs and have just declared bankruptcy. Her husband worked on Wall Street out of college, but went down in all the corporate shakeups of that era. He now builds custom cabinetry and is the at-home parent. She details: "My body almost single-handedly bankrupted us. It also, with a little bit of help, made and then sustained the two best things in our lives. We were just privileged enough to think that we could live outside the systems and the structures and survive it, but we failed." (47) Daily stability is the primary task and it takes herculean effort, especially from Elizabeth who has the steady job teaching at a charter school that carries family insurance. It also swallows her soul. "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." (14) She seeks other ways to feed it: a friendship with a Chilean writer who comes to visit the university where she is an adjunct, in job #2, reading incessantly when she should be grading, supervising, etc for job #1, and stalking her childhood best friend Sasha "the person who would make [her] be okay" on social media. From the book jacket: "...Strong explores the subtle violence of one woman's wanting and the ways in which the desire for things, success, stability, even true human connection, always comes with a cost - to ourselves and most often, to others." The narrator keeps the reader at arm's length and it is hard to be sympathetic, but I think the point is she doesn't want pity, whatever else she does want. It's a largely joyless existence, except in her relationship with her daughters. Other stressors: her toxic relationship with her parents, who are wealthy, but stingy and punitive; a #metoo situation at the university where she works that threatens jobs, a history of mental health issues, and the phantom limb of her relationship with Sasha. Elizabeth shoulders it all, with her head down and a faint sense of she deserves it. Great quote: "I want to give her what she wants, to get what we want, and not care. I no longer believe that there's such a thing as everybody getting what they want and no one paying for it later. I'm embarrassed, maybe, by how much I still hope we can get to okay on our own." (155) Ultimately this book reflects the struggle of going it alone, or asking and accepting help and it is presented thoughtfully and beautifully.

[ridgewaygirl · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An adjunct professor who also teaches at a high school to make ends meet and who, with her husband, is in the process of filing for bankruptcy. She goes about her life, sneaking out of work early, taking care of her two daughters, becoming involved in the issues her students bring to her and thinking about her best friend, with whom she is no longer in contact. This novel is involving and very readable, while not having much in the way of a plot. The reader is set in the middle of Elizabeth's life for a short time and then the book ends, making it feel more like a long short story than a novel. Despite that, it's impossible not to be caught up in Elizabeth's fraught relationship with her problematic parents, to worry about money alongside her, to feel how much she loves her daughters and misses her best friend. I very much enjoyed reading this book; the writing is very good, but in the end I don't expect it to sit with me for very long.

[zeljanamaricferli · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"There was a time I thought that all language might contain something of value, but most of life is flat and boring and the things we say are too. Or maybe it’s that most of life is so much stranger than language is able to make room for, so we say the same dead things and hope maybe the who and how of what is said can make it into what we mean."

I waited for this novel to be released like no other book this summer. The blurb sounded promising because the story seemed so familiar.
This novel is much much bleaker than the colourful cover may suggest. It reads like a journal of a depressed woman, haunted by a failed friendship and the disillusionment of adulthood. Things that she wants seem irreconcilable, limited by so many external factors and internal struggles. She carries the burden of all the roles she must play in the lives of others and finds it hard to keep composure while the center cannot hold. She seems to get control over her life by her long morning runs and escaping into literature.
This is a stream of consciousness kind of a book that reads well. The language is straightforward and raw.
I felt like the end was hopeful in a nice, indie feel-good movie kind of way (and the cover actually makes perfect sense).

[brangwinn · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The cover alone is enough to entice a reader into this book. Although the narrator remains nameless, it’s a powerful story of a teacher who struggles with helping her students at an underfunded charter school and the students are all of color and economically struggling. Our narrator, herself lives in a tiny Brooklyn apartment with her husband and two daughters. Surrounded by the struggle to survive and be a good parent, she feels isolated and alone. I feel the author is trying to shed light on privilege, white liberalism, and social problems. While interesting, I had trouble connecting with the story line.