I had never heard of this book by Lynn Steger Strong until my book club decided to read it, and I don’t really know what to make of it. I’m not even sure what the title’s referring to, unless it’s just want in general, because the main character wants all kinds of things.
Not only is there no discernable plot, but almost none of these characters has a name. It’s written in first person from the perspective of the main character, Elizabeth, who talks a lot about her best friend from high school, Sasha, with whom she’s lost touch, but she clearly wants to reconnect. She texts Sasha, and Sasha occasionally texts back, and Elizabeth stalks her on social media, but that’s the extent of their relationship.
The more pressing issues Elizabeth has to deal with are the fact that she and her husband are filing for bankruptcy. She is a high school English teacher who moonlights at a local college, and her husband is a freelance carpenter who left the toxic world of finance to do something he loves right before the 2008 financial crisis hit.
Elizabeth’s husband is never named, and their two daughters are never named, although I think the older one’s name is Mariah. Instead, Elizabeth only ever refers to them as the four-year old and the two-year old, although the latter is sometimes referred to as the baby. Her husband is only ever referred to as her husband.
At work, she has co-homeroom teachers, an assistant who is referred to as the twenty-four-year-old, the principal, and the students. I think the only student who is ever named is Kayla, who clearly has problems at home and sometimes walks out in the middle of class.
At the college, Elizabeth has a quadrilingual friend who is only ever referred to as her quadrilingual friend. Then an author from Chile comes to hear Elizabeth teach at the college and they strike up a friendship, but she’s only ever referred to as the Chilean writer.
Elizabeth is also struggling with her relationship with her parents, which has never been good. They are your stereotypical straight-laced conservatives who believe if you just buckle down and work hard, you can get everything you want. They use Elizabeth’s history of depression and anxiety as a weapon against her, threatening to take away her children, which they could probably do because they’re both lawyers.
Elizabeth had cut off contact with them a couple years ago for the sake of her mental health, but now that it’s been a couple years, she’s wondering why they can’t just get along. The answer is because her parents keep picking at the scabs of their relationship, and not in a way that’s looking for understanding and closure. They only ever do it in a way that blames Elizabeth for doing everything wrong.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth is struggling with the fact that the educational system sucks. She works at an inner city school with a lot of disadvantaged students who have checked out because no one cares about them enough to motivate them to do the classwork. Elizabeth has motivated them and gotten them thinking, but since she’s not preparing them to take the tests they’re required to take, the teacher moves her to another class. Then she gives up on the system and starts leaving work early because no one cares enough to check up on where she is or how much work she’s doing.
Throughout the course of the book we get flashbacks of Elizabeth’s relationship with Sasha and where things went wrong. As it turns out, Sasha got pregnant from a one-night stand when they were teaching English in Asia, and rather than go home with her to support her through the pregnancy, Elizabeth does the selfish thing and decides to stay in Asia, abandoning her friend when she needs her most.
Sasha is sent to an uncle’s house to have the baby, but she miscarries. Elizabeth flies out to be there for her in her grief, and when she flies home, they promise to stay in touch, and they sort of do, but it’s obviously the end of their relationship.
Present-day Sasha is married and pregnant again. She gives birth to a healthy baby, then goes radio silent for a while, then shows up on Elizabeth’s door unannounced. She plays with Elizabeth’s kids and cries and admits she’s terrified. I don’t think Elizabeth says anything super profound. Mostly she just listens and holds Sasha while she cries and is there for her in the way she wishes she had been there for her the first time she was pregnant.
Eventually, Sasha gets on a plane back home, Elizabeth quits her day job and lines up four other jobs to make up for the lost income. Then they get kicked out of their apartment because it’s being converted to a condo and they can’t afford to buy it, and Elizabeth finally buckles down and asks her parents for money so they can make a down payment on another apartment, and the book just kind of ends.
The arc makes me think that the relationship between Elizabeth and Sasha is what the book is really about, but it covers so much more than that, despite being a super short book. It’s well written, but I can’t say I’m dying to read anything else by Steger Strong.