![]() ![]() Her relationship to her husband exists in the gutters of the day. Anxiety hums underneath every scene, a deep and fundamental instability. The tiny, contained shape of the story’s start belies the tension coiled tight in Strong’s rhythmic, propulsive prose. ![]() And sometimes creeps on an old best friend’s social media accounts. Later in the week, she leads a college course on literature. Afterward she breakfasts with her two kids, then teaches Literature and Language at a charter high school where the students are all of color and in economic need. The unnamed narrator, a white woman in her early thirties, wakes at 4:30 in the morning to run through Brooklyn, where she lives with her husband and two daughters in an apartment so small she sleeps on a bed lofted in a closet. ![]() Like our conversation, Strong’s new novel, Want, opens in motion. ![]() “I don’t think there’s a better place to run than New York City.” “I got a little weepy on the bridge just now,” she says over the phone, as she begins the long jaunt back to her apartment from the waterfront. She’d been sheltering at a friend’s place in Jersey since quarantine began in March, and is happy to be back in the city she’s called home for ten years, even during a pandemic. It’s a beautiful day in May and she just ran across the Brooklyn Bridge for the first time in months. Lynn Steger Strong greets me in a voice thickened by emotion, exertion, and a protective mask. ![]()
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