Hold Still centers upon a tenured professor at Columbia University, living in a beautiful brownstone running up against the limits of unconditional love. SEE ALSO: In ‘One to Watch’ Kate Stayman-London Reimagines Reality TV as Fully Inclusive Although it’s very possible that she could have published a collection of essays next, four years after her first book, Lynn Steger Strong is now publishing a second novel called Want This novel haunts many of the same streets as Hold Still, but this time, it engages with a radically different set of circumstances. Strong’s essays lay bare the stark facts of life navigating a childhood of privilege only to find one’s self as an adult without a safety net. In subsequent years, her many essays on downward mobility, culture and parenthood found a fierce following. While Hold Still didn’t break out, Strong continued to write and teach in New York. Eager to pass down an emotionally honest book, I hoped Hold Still would find an audience. At the gate in the Tulsa airport, I gave my copy to two women discussing their favorite novels. I loved that book with its wounded characters and tough questions. What kept me reading were the raw needs of a mother and daughter grappling with an unforgivable accident, aching to be seen and loved, no matter how distorted or strained their relationship had become. Traveling around Missouri and Oklahoma, it wasn’t the characters or the brownstone in tony Park Slope, Brooklyn, that connected with me.

Four years ago, I read Lynn Steger Strong’s debut novel, Hold Still, in transit while uncomfortably pregnant. The truth is that publication doesn’t necessarily satisfy that secondary desire most debut novels don’t become bestsellers. It seems easy to speculate that what writers want most is to be published and read.

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