Lynn Steger Strong

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.

A Novel

Want

Flight

"For fans of Celeste Ng's Everything I Never Told You, a gripping and heartfelt family portrait from an achingly precise new voice. Evoking finely wrought characters reminiscent of those by Claire Messud or Elizabeth Strout, debut author Lynn Steger Strong traces the anatomy of a mistake and the weight of culpability. When Maya Taylor, an English professor with a tendency to hide in her books, sends her daughter to Florida to look after a friend's child, she does so with the best of intentions; it's a chance for Ellie, twenty and spiraling, to rebuild her life. But Ellie fears she'll only disappoint again, and in the sprawling hours of one humid afternoon, she makes a mistake that she can't take back. In two separate timelines--before and after the catastrophe--Maya and Ellie must try to repair their fractured relationship and find a way to transcend not only their differences but also their more troubling similarities. Heralding the arrival of a profoundly moving new talent, Hold Still explores the depths and limits of a mother's love"--

Hold Still

"What I loved most about The Float Test is the sense of place. ... The adult children of the family gather on the hot ground of their childhood following their mother’s death, where they try to untangle decades of betrayals and sorrow, and reclaim their sense of home." — Ann Napolitano, New York Times bestselling author of Hello Beautiful From Lynn Steger Strong, critically acclaimed author of Flight, a sophisticated and layered novel about sisters, betrayal, love, and climate change, for readers of The Dutch House and The Most Fun We Ever Had. The Kenner siblings are at odds. Gathered after a major loss, each sibling needs the others more than ever—if only they could trust each other. Jenn is a harried mom struggling under the weight of family obligations. Fred is a novelist who can’t write, maybe because she’s lost faith in storytelling itself. Jude is a recovering corporate lawyer with her own story to tell, and a grudge against her former favorite sister, Fred. George, the baby, is estranged from his wife and harboring both a secret about his former employer and an ill-advised crush on one of his sisters’ friends. When the four are reunited it's clear that much has changed between them. Equally unsettling are the changes around them; the climate of their hometown is hotter and more oppressive than ever before. A family story is, of course, only as honest as the person telling it. This family story in particular is fraught with secrets about kids and sex and jobs and why the Kenner matriarch had a gun in her underwear drawer. The biggest secret of all though is the secret of what happened between Jude and Fred to create such a rift between the two once-close middle sisters. Over the course of a sweltering Florida summer, the Kenner siblings will revisit what it means to be a family and, if they are smart and kind and lucky, come out on the other side better for having each other. A rich exploration of family, ambition, secrets, and love, The Float Test is an elegant and gripping testament to the power that family has to both nurture and destroy us from a critically acclaimed writer working at the top of her craft.

The Float Test

Niedostatek to przejmująca historia, uderzająca w najczulsze punkty i odnosząca się do najskrytszych obaw „niedoskonałych” kobiet, w której każda z nas odnajdzie kawałek siebie. Główna bohaterka Elisabeth zmaga się z pozbawioną lukru codziennością, zderza z depresją, odrzuceniem, bankructwem. Próbuje przetrwać i łączyć wszystkie role, jakie narzuca na siebie sama lub w jakich widzi ją społeczeństwo. Przytłaczające zmęczenie, presja Instagrama, wyzwania macierzyństwa, rozczarowanie pracą i doktoratem, oczekiwania męża – wszystko to próbuje jakoś pogodzić i zrównoważyć. Ukojenie przynosi poranne bieganie i … dawno utracona więź z przyjaciółką z młodości, Sashą. Przyjaciółka Elisabeth także zmaga się z kryzysem i być może po wielu latach ich wspólne chwile z przeszłości staną się sposobem na odzyskanie kontroli nad życiem w czasie teraźniejszym. W Niedostatku Lynn Steger Strong bada subtelne, często niezauważalne akty przemocy, których dokonuje się na pewnym typie kobiet, kiedy te odważą się chcieć czegoś więcej. To rewelacyjnie napisana, wciągająca historia, która z jednej strony przyczynia się do głębszej refleksji, ale jednocześnie – co potwierdza uznanie ze strony „Time Magazine” – świetnie sprawdzi się jako literatura na okres wakacyjny. Lynn Steger Strong stawia ważne pytania: czego pragniemy? A raczej: czego potrzebujemy? Oraz: co jesteśmy w stanie dać? I kiedy? Jej bohaterka należy do pokolenia niespełnionych marzeń i złamanych obietnic. Do tego boryka się z macierzyństwem, które też nie jest idealne. Na szczęście czasami wystarczy po prostu być. Bo te drobne zdarzenia i z pozoru banalne historie, z których składa się nasza codzienność, pozwalają odzyskać nadzieję. - Karolina Kaja Gołuchowska, redaktorka naczelna portalu Ofeminin Każdy z nas boryka się z myślami, których nigdy nie wypowie na głos. Te myśli to sto procent prawdy o nas samych – bez złudzeń czy filtrów politycznej i społecznej poprawności. Dlatego szczerość tej książki dosłownie zwala z nóg. Bo nie jesteśmy do czegoś takiego przyzwyczajeni. Wiesz, jak to jest grać drugoplanową rolę w swoim własnym życiu? Z zapałem śledzić cudze historie i żyć nimi, choć przez to własne życie wydaje się blade i pozbawione sensu? Czym jest niedosyt i brak satysfakcji? Niedostatek? O tym właśnie opowiada ta książka – i czyni to w sposób niebywale lekki, tonem typowym dla powieści na lato. Może dlatego mówi o nas więcej, niż same chciałybyśmy przyznać. - Monika Pryśko, autorka bloga Tekstualna.pl

Niedostatek

A "wildly evocative" (Elle.com) family portrait that explores the depths and limits of a mother’s love. When Maya Taylor, an English professor with a tendency to hide in her books, sends her daughter to Florida to look after a friend’s child, she does so with the best of intentions; it’s a chance for Ellie, twenty and spiraling, to rebuild her life. But in the sprawling hours of one humid afternoon, Ellie makes a mistake she cannot take back. In two separate timelines—before and after the catastrophe—Maya and Ellie must try to repair their fractured relationship and find a way to transcend not only their differences but also their more troubling similarities. "[Melding] psychological insight, precise plotting and limpid prose" (Huffington Post), Lynn Steger Strong traces the anatomy of a mistake and the weight of culpability. Hold Still marks a taut and propulsive debut that "builds to a perfect crescendo, an ending that is both surprising and true" (Marcy Dermansky, author of The Red Car).

Lynn Steger Strong

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