Author Snapshot: Lynn Steger Strong
Book jacket biographies don’t tell us nearly enough about the authors we love. That’s why Zibby Mag launched the Author Snapshot, giving readers an inside look at the lives and work of our favorite writers.
This week we’re spotlighting author Lynn Steger Strong and her new novel, Flight, which releases on Tuesday!
What inspired you to write Flight?
Flight came on the other side of my previous novel, Want, which was most interested in how broken everything feels, how we manage to live and love and maintain some sense of who we are in the face of that. Flight is what I felt after finishing Want: okay, things are broken, no one is coming to save us, but we still have to live, try to create new systems and rituals, maybe even art, for our kids. In Flight, the mom has died and her children and their spouses are all bumbling around, afraid and uncertain, now that she’s not there to show them how to care for one another. They have to finally figure out how to be a family without any clear guidance. Another mom and her child are in real peril and the family has to find newer, different ways to come together to help them.
What is your writing process like?
I have two kids; I usually have at least two other jobs. When I’m writing, which is not always—I spend long stretches of time just carrying the book around in my head—it is usually very early in the morning. I get up around 4:30 and write until the kids get up. As I get further into a project, it becomes easier to do it in any stretch of time that appears before me, waiting for a student at work or on my phone at school pickup. I have to do the first draft early enough that none of my actual life has seeped into my brain, which often makes me lose my nerve. I write first drafts pretty quickly (a couple of months), but then I spend at least a year re-writing, pressing into all of the spaces I’ve created, and seeing what else they might hold inside of them, reconsidering the sentiments or tensions I’ve conjured and trying to figure out what the deeper, closer-to-the-bone layer might actually be.
Throughout the book you deftly move between narrators and allegiances. Was it difficult to write a nuanced examination of this family? And are you able to approach your own family and in-laws with similar, unbiased grace?
Haha. This is a great question, and I’ll answer the second part first and say: definitely not always with my actual family! For the book, it was a process of constantly re-considering: starting from the place the characters start, which is annoyances and petty grievances, all the various obstacles that we both see and create in order to avoid having to actually care for one another, to acknowledge one another as complicated, messy, mushy human beings. And then I slowly ground away at all those grievances, turned them upside down, tried to see them in other, different ways. Some characters were easier to write than others, but my overall goal was for every character to have moments of destabilization, moments they subvert your expectations, surprise the reader and the other family members and themselves. I wanted to implicate the reader in the snap judgments that they made about one another and then subvert or complicate those judgments as often as I could.
The characters in Flight are grappling with their individual experiences of losing their mother, Helen, but the book also touches on other types of loss: jobs, career dreams, infertility, finances, expectation, family rituals, and more. What drew you to explore the themes of grief and loss in this family novel?
I think so much of the last three years has clarified for me the difference between lack and loss, and that is a lot of what the book is about. I’ve lost some dear friends in the past couple of years, but also, we had to move; we have lost jobs and a community that was incredibly important to our whole family. I think I became particularly interested in the ways loss is not the same as lack, and how much of what you lose, especially when it is a person, you get to carry with you once they’re gone. None of this is to say that loss isn’t impossibly hard, that you don’t feel it and carry it in your body every day, but I also think, as a person who’s spent a lot of time thinking about the lacks we also carry, loss is so much richer, so much more complicated and layered and formative than any of the things we never knew or had enough to mourn.
What do you hope readers will take away from reading Flight?
I knew the ending of the book before I ever wrote a word of it. Without giving any of it away, it’s my attempt to ask the reader to consider whether or not and why and how we might still be able to come together—amidst all our petty grievances, our fear, shame, and uncertainty—to care for one another, to share small moments of grace.
Listen to Zibby’s interview with Lynn about her last book, Want, here!