Millennial’s Lament
“We cannot live outside the systems and structures, but, it turns out, I cannot live within them either anymore”
-Want x Lynn Steger Strong
Our protagonist in Want struggles with economic anxiety.
Not the kind that makes people vote for a racist and deplorable person, but the variety that compels someone to declare bankruptcy, work two jobs, and seek escapes and solutions in unlikely places.
Our (mostly unnamed) protagonist has lost track of her adolescent best friend, lost her professional narrative and professional security and is wrestling with her place in so many systems: the charter school where she works, parenthood, marriage, and capitalism to name a few. In her story, I saw shadows of friends and peers who also did all the right things, got the multiple degrees, and yet life doesn’t look like what we were promised or sold.
Want explores the different types of lack that can affect us in this part of the 21st century, lack of community, lack of being understood, and especially lack of stability which means money. She deals with this lack by escaping into books or movies, or other indulgences she can’t really afford and by trying to reconnect with her old best friend.
So what happens to dreams deferred for an individual for a whole generation? A lot of it depends on your race, gender, class, and other dimensions of diversity. Our protagonist, whose name you learn near the very end of the books, lives outside of her privilege in a lot ways, but even the dire economic circumstances she finds herself in are mitigate by her Whiteness. Through flashbacks to her adolescence and current quotidian life Steger Strong shares a story that is at once intimate and also universal.
“We were just privileged enough to think that we could live outside the systems and the structures and survive it, but we failed.”
It was a fascinating experience reading this book in the summer of 2020 when so many people are reconsidering the systems they benefit from and those that consequently, intentionally hurt others.
A few things:
Read this novel along with Lynn Steger Strong’s "Two in Five" column with the Guardian that depicts the decline of the middle class.
This book would pair nicely with It Was All a Dream: A New Generation Confronts the Broken Promise to Black America. It’s an exploration of how Black millennial navigate the lie of the “American Dream”.
One thing that I haven’t been able to shake is that our protagonist allegedly was a year older than me, but the text said 9/11 happened her second week of college. It’s a minor mistake that I’m sure can happen to anyone, but this tragedy is a fundamental event anchoring millennials to their/my/our generation.