‘Want’: Featured Fiction from Lynn Steger Strong

In today’s edition of featured fiction—curated by our own Carolyn Quimby—we present an excerpt from Lynn Steger Strong’s novel Want.

Following on the heels of Hold Still, the novel won praise from Kirkus, which called it “a wise, unflinching, and compelling novel about womanhood,” and Vulture, which hailed it as “a defining novel of our age of left-behind families.”

It was hot already, wet and sticky—college; I was nine-teen; she was twenty; she’d driven from her school three hours away to spend the summer with me—and she shaved my head out on the roof of the row house I shared with two other girls and laughed as large chunks of hair fell down to the porch; the buzz of her hands on my neck was the closest that I’d come to joy in years. For weeks, we’d talked about it, a joke I made that she latched onto. I liked the thrill she seemed to get at the prospect: a sort of recklessness I’d receded from—mostly, then, I was locked up in my attic room—just as hers was amping up.

I didn’t think I’d care what I looked like after. I had images of waiflike women with large features staring