Though Elizabeth herself is a victim of some of these dynamics of inequality, she is also in a position of relative security.

A tragedy in her apartment building, which is “half rent-controlled apartments and half gentrifiers who can’t afford renovated apartments,” spurs the landlord to begin pushing tenants out in favor of a coop. Alongside Elizabeth’s experience are repeated instances of systemic failure: She fears retribution as a vulnerable adjunct while reporting the widespread but silenced accusations against a male professor, and her whiteness makes her a “hero” for doing the “good, important work” of teaching primarily Black, low-income students at an “underserved” high school. While Want is primarily the story of Elizabeth and her husband as they care for their two daughters and attempt to survive under an impossible burden of medical and student debts, Steger Strong uses Elizabeth to witness greater precarity and structural violence. Reading Want, I see myself in Elizabeth’s memories, the temporary sense of safety and potential she found in her early twenties, like the exhale of a match before it catches fire.

That I’d be clinging gratefully to my job. If only I’d have known then that I’d be wearing variations on pajamas for three months in a row. Someone who wears outfits in the most elegant sense of the word. I texted all my friends about it, thumb hovering over the checkout button, justifying the potential purchase as “Mormon chic.” It seemed like the kind of thing I would wear and be able to afford if I was the kind of person I hoped to be: three inches taller, quippy, manicured, well-read. In early March, when I was still commuting on the subway and buying coffee from a cart, I bought an outfit I couldn’t really afford online after a random stylist posted it to her Depop. (“I will dispose of it before I get home, evidence of all the ways I am still a spoiled rich kid, as if my husband will not also see the charge on our account,” Elizabeth says.) Every item seems like it might be the last, a fatalist’s attempt at a brief and doomed happiness. These unsanctioned outings are funded by the “magic” credit card, the only one that still works, and purchases include a movie ticket, an artist biography, gummy candy, eye cream, T-shirts, and an expensive outfit from a West Village boutique in which to attend the bankruptcy hearing. In the afternoons, when she is supposed to be preparing lessons or tutoring students, Elizabeth escapes into the city to read books in the park or wander the Guggenheim. She works two jobs as a high school teacher and an adjunct professor of literature. Elizabeth and her husband are in the process of declaring bankruptcy. “I want to not be someone who says no all the time to every impulse,” declares Elizabeth, the narrator of Lynn Steger Strong’s new novel, Want.

Lynn steger strong want