It’s Deeply Lonely to Pretend: A Conversation with Lynn Steger Strong

Svetlana Satchkova interviews Lynn Steger Strong about her new novel, WANT, and what it means to write and parent in the world today

I’ve long been a fan of Lynn Steger Strong, who’s written thoughtfully and exquisitely about motherhood, her complicated relationship with her affluent parents, and the almost-impossibility of making a living by writing and teaching—but I think that Strong’s new novel Want is her best work yet. Its spare, elegant prose slices you like the sharpest of knives: There seems to be an enormous amount of energy packed into every phrase, and you want to get to the end of the book as quickly as possible while longing for it to never end.

The novel is about a Brooklyn-based couple: Elizabeth, a college and high-school teacher with a Ph.D., and her husband, who left finance to do something he actually loves: making furniture with his own hands. They have two very young daughters, unpaid student loans and medical bills, and find themselves looking at bankruptcy as their only option. It’s a poignant and furious meditation on the ways people who did everything right see their dreams crushed. I jumped at the chance to talk to Lynn about her incredibly timely book.

– Svetlana Satchkova for Catapult

Svetlana Satchkova: Having read both your novel and your column in The Guardian, I came to think that Want is heavily based on your own life. Is it?

Lynn Steger Strong: “Heavily based on my own life” feels very strong. I’m obviously interested in talking about financial precarity, and I’ve experienced financial precarity. I think that, as a writer, I’m more impactful in the space of a scene and, with that in mind, I’ve created a lot of events for Want in order to show ideas that felt really important to me. The narrator, Elizabeth, looks a lot like me: She is a thirty-something white woman who is a mother, who teaches and struggles financially. But, with regard to the concrete events of the novel, I had to make a lot of things up in order to give the book shape. And, at the end of the day, I identify more as a fiction writer than anything else—it’s where I’m most comfortable and where I think I’m able to accomplish the most.

So, I honestly don’t think about the book as very autobiographical, although I don’t begrudge anyone taking note of the obvious overlaps between my narrator and I.

As a writer, I’m more impactful in the space of a scene.

SS: For me, Want is a continuation of your nonfiction. For instance, I remember reading your essay on your relationship with your parents in Catapult, and I found the same theme surfacing in Want.

LSS: I think that everybody—although maybe this isn’t true—has a complicated relationship with their parents. I find it worth talking about, if only to talk about how we carry with us those complexities and the narratives of the relationships with the people who formed us, how we feel stuck inside them or how we break outside of them. That’s interesting to me as a human, as a thinker, and as a writer. But again, I think that the specificity of my relationship with my parents is only as interesting to me in my work as it is able to say something bigger than just that. Because otherwise I should just go to therapy. (Well, I should do that.)

SS: I’m also a mother, and I find motherhood to be beautiful and horrifying at the same time, because it made me into an anxious person who’s constantly frightened of what might happen to her son. Is your experience of motherhood scary in the same way?

LSS: I’m scared all of the time, and that fear is only amplified in our present moment. Right now, I’m also tired all of the time: My kids are six and seven, and my husband is gone twelve hours a day. But having kids has given my life an incredible depth of joy and richness, and the fear of losing them is too inextricably linked to the joy of having them to ever wish that I didn’t get that. The fear is real, it’s constant, it’s inside of my body; the level of vigilance I’m performing now is physically almost paralyzing. But this live body crawling onto my lap or telling me a story or making me a picture feels extraordinary—more extraordinary than the fear.

SS: Are you worried about the future?

LSS: I keep thinking to myself that my job as a parent is to open the world up to my kids, but I feel that instead the world is getting smaller and scarier. Raising children in the time of climate change, horrifying leadership, and a pandemic is hard, but the privilege of parenthood is that most of it is daily and hourly, and it has taught me that it’s also life. We had a nice day today at the beach, and now my kids are watching a movie, and everyone is safe and happy and clean and eating. Children this little don’t often demand beyond that, and insofar as I want to enjoy where I am right now, I try to force myself to sit inside of that. I do want the world to be something salvageable when they are bigger, and that’s what I’m interested in exploring as a writer.

I also believe in voting and canvassing. I do believe that we can work to make things better and that collective action matters. I’m more invested in that than ever.

SS: Elizabeth is a writer who teaches at a prestigious university, but can’t afford an extra drink when dining out with friends. In our society, success is defined as making a lot of money. What problems do you see with this definition?

LSS: It is embedded in the systems that we are a part of, and it’s also embedded into our daily lives. I could try saying that money is not indicative of what my work is worth, but of course money is indicative of what my work is worth—because if I don’t have money, I don’t have time and space to make more work. We come from societies and we can’t help but learn their values. That’s why most people presume that money is a sign of achievement and therefore value of an individual, which I can tell you I find patently absurd. And yet I can also tell you that there have been plenty of moments in my life when I felt extraordinary shame for not having any money. It’s about systems and structures, but it’s also about me feeling shame that I can’t provide for my children in the way that I wish I could provide for them. I feel shame that I have to work a third job and I can’t be present for my children in the same way I want to be present for them. So it is capitalism, and it is an abstraction, but it’s also very much a concrete reality.

If I don’t have money, I don’t have time and space to make more work.

SS: I think that you’re incredibly brave to talk about the shame of not having money, which is a taboo in our society.

LSS: It’s deeply lonely to pretend. Shame often creates pretending, which often creates loneliness, and the thing that I value more than anything is community. I started to see in my own life the way that my shame kept me from sharing my experience with friends and therefore kept me from feeling an intimacy toward my friends. It just stopped feeling worth it. And the more I talked to people, the more I made myself vulnerable to them, the more they made themselves vulnerable to me, it felt much less individual. It turned out that there was this quiet collective shame, and that almost nobody had as much as I’d thought they had. Or, if some people did have plenty, they didn’t actually comprehend what it meant to not have a lot.

There’s a certain contingent of individuals even among the progressives and liberals who have very little relationship with most people’s daily realities, because they’ve never sat down at the end of the month and had to figure out what had to go. My job as a writer is to look carefully and precisely at whatever I think is worth looking at and to force others to look carefully and precisely as well. When I’m doing that, I don’t feel that it has much to do with me. When an essay of mine gets published, people are always like, “Oh, you shared this thing,” and I always have a moment of shock and say, “Yes, but I’m not the point! I’m using myself as an example to show something that feels important to me.”

It’s deeply lonely to pretend.

SS: Your novel speaks about our capitalist society that’s not prepared to adequately compensate people who pursue learning and teaching. What are your thoughts on that?

LSS: I think this system has been corrupted and upended over years. I’m not a policy-maker, and I feel that my job is to show it’s deeply broken. There’s a great essay right now by Marilyn Robinson in the New York Review of Books, where she talks about how we somehow decided what is worth money, and the way that the words “public” and “private” carry a certain meaning. There’s an assumption among certain groups of individuals that a public hospital or a public school is less than a private one, and often the people who work at those places are compensated likewise. We all say that teachers are very valuable, but we don’t give them any money—as if there were anything more important than educating our society. People who trade stocks are not essential, but we give them a lot of money. I don’t know what to do about that, but I do wish that people would think about it more.

SS: Want is full of anger, and you’ve written about anger in your nonfiction. What are you angry about?

LSS: I’m angry about the extraordinary inequities of our society, about the broken education system, about the fact that there are hungry children and people don’t care. I’ve read somewhere, and it’s so stupid and pithy, but the thing keeps coming back to me: “How do I make you care about other people?”

For a long time, it felt like anger belonged to men, and, as an individual and as a writer, I’m interested in inhabiting spaces that previously belonged to men. What used to belong to women—and does, to a certain extent, still belong to women—is pain and victimhood, and I think that agency is inevitably accompanied by anger. It feels like a move forward, and it can be a useful feeling to model, just that it’s okay to be angry, it’s okay to have anger in your body, and it’s okay to perform syntax that is angry. But also, for myself, I don’t want to be angry all the time.

SS: Do you think that writing is therapeutic?

LSS: I have this theory that when you’re writing, you should pick a bruise, and, the whole time you’re writing, it should feel like you’re pushing as hard and firmly on that bruise as you can. Writing shouldn’t necessarily feel good. I’m not writing from the space where I try to work out my feelings or to make myself feel better. I think that a lot of writers write to feel more in control. Insofar as I can situate my fear and my thoughts inside of language, which is an exciting and fascinating space to me, there is a power that comes from that. And sometimes that power can feel like a relief, as opposed to just walking around in the world and feeling generally quite bad. So I guess that part of it feels good, but calling it therapeutic is probably pushing it.

SS: Your writing is incredibly precise. Do you spend a lot of time polishing your sentences?

LSS: Everything for me comes back to the sentence and especially to rhythm. I read everything out loud. I do often start with a messy rush of ideas, and then it’s a lot of cutting back and tightening. I think about sentences constantly. If I don’t have the rhythm of the piece, I can’t finish it, and once I do have the rhythm of the piece, I can mostly find my way to the end, even if I’m not fully sure what I’m saying or what I’m looking at.

SS: Do you revise a lot?

LSS: I often give my students the assignment, “take something that you’ve written and cut the word count in half,” and I often give myself a version of that assignment. Because we all have lots of things that we think are important, but inevitably aren’t. I ask myself: “This sentence accomplishes one thing, but could it accomplish three things?” I’m endlessly interested in tightness and sharpness, which inevitably means a lot of cutting. Which is fine.

SS: Do you have a writing routine? What’s your space and time to write?

LSS: I get up at four, and I run for an hour, and I write for an hour. Then my younger daughter usually gets up around six-thirty. Sometimes she’s up at five-thirty, and other times she’s up at seven. When life starts, and you have to think about the coffee, the laundry, what’s for dinner, and all of these other things, I feel it muddles up my brain. When none of that has happened yet, my brain feels totally fresh, and I can enter this other world before I have to enter ours.

Writing shouldn’t necessarily feel good. 

As I’m further along on a project and things get looser, I can often do it in smaller spaces of time; editing is a lot easier to pop in and pop out of. As an adjunct professor, I’m quite busy, but I also have these weird windows of time. Of course, this isn’t true now, but in normal life I have a three-hour window on a Tuesday, and I can sit and chop away at something. But my general rule is early mornings no matter what, and then anywhere else I can find the time and space.

SS: Are you working on anything new right now?

LSS: It’s been hard for me to write too much lately, but I have a novel that I’ve been working on for a while. It’s about raising children and making art as the world burns, basically.

SS: You’re teaching Catapult’s 12-month novel generator that’s starting in September. Where did the idea for this class come from?

LSS: Julie Buntin and I are friends, and we have had a lot of conversations over the years about the things we found frustrating about our MFAs, not least the simple fact that there was more of a focus on short fiction. We became interested in giving people a more intimate and committed space for working on a big project. I took a novel-writing workshop in graduate school with Victor LaValle, which was by far the best class I took in grad school. One of the reasons was that Victor is extraordinary, but the second was that we had a lot of time to get to know one another and get to know one another’s projects. In my class, I hope to recreate this level of intimacy and cohesion for the group. The understanding that you’re going to leave here with a novel creates a very intense and, I hope, very exciting camaraderie, but also people feel obligated to get the work done, if only because they’ve signed up. It’s a great thing to teach, and I love the idea of helping writers to get to places they’ve never gotten to before.

SS: In an ideal world, would you only write or would you teach too?

LSS: I love teaching: it pleases a similar part of my brain to writing. Like writing, teaching is also about communication, engagement with humans, fluidity, and empathy, but it’s a cheaper thrill. Not to undermine teaching, but satisfactions come more quickly and more often than they do in writing. I’m really grateful that my students pull me out of my own head and show me new ways of reading. In my ideal world, I would always teach, but I would maybe have one fewer teaching gigs than I have right now.