'A deeply intelligent and sneakily moving novel about having the ground fall away beneath your feet. ―Emma Cline, NYT bestselling author of The Girls 'Furious, aching and razor sharp, Want is a beautiful book.' 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. Grappling with motherhood, economic anxiety, rage, and the limits of language, Want is a fiercely personal novel that vibrates with anger, insight, and love.Įlizabeth is tired. Their paths split in their 20s following a fissure that proved too painful to overcome, until a crisis sends Sasha catapulting back into Elizabeth’s orbit.Named a Best Book of 2020 by Time Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, NPR, Vulture, The New Yorker, and Kirkus Strong writes of their friendship in exacting detail, illustrating the ferocity with which women can care for one another. She found solace in Sasha, her childhood best friend, who offered the support she so clearly needed. Moving flashbacks reveal a youth spent in Florida, where a quietly self-destructive Elizabeth received little comfort from her wealthy and success-driven parents.

She laments, “My body almost single-handedly bankrupted us.”

For Elizabeth, desperate to lead a life different from her upbringing, devotion to her academic ambitions and motherhood leave her emotionally, physically and financially drained. In Want, the author interrogates that intensity again through Elizabeth, who is feeling increasingly trapped by her desires. In her debut novel, Hold Still, Strong examined the intensity of love that exists within a familial unit.

Want a novel lynn steger strong