Named a Best Book of 2020 by Time Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, NPR, Vulture, The New Yorker, and Kirkus
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.
