Want
Elizabeth is a wife, mother, and teacher in New York City, struggling under the weight of all those roles. Over-educated and under-employed--yet working constantly as a high school teacher by day and adjunct faculty member at Columbia (unnamed, but it's clear) by night--she and her husband have declared bankruptcy.
Drowning under the weight of her responsibilities and the frustration of her "teach-to-the-test" day job, she begins leaving work and wandering, mulling over her path to this point, her neglected friendships, and her deep love of her children.
At times, this somewhat stream-of-consciousness book feels a little claustrophobic, but that's also part of the point. This book about modern motherhood will feel familiar to any woman who has felt overwhelmed while trying to balance it all.
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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.