A Strange Alchemy: A Guest Post by Lynn Steger Strong
Four siblings reunite in Florida after one of their parents passes, leaving them reeling from life, love, ambition, betrayal and success in Lynn Steger Strong’s (Flight) latest, The Float Test. Read on for an exclusive essay from Lynn on her own reunion with Florida and what inspired her to write The Float Test.
Hardcover
$25.99
$28.99
The Float Test: A Novel
The Float Test: A Novel
In Stock Online
Hardcover
$25.99
$28.99
From Lynn Steger Strong, critically acclaimed author of Flight, a sophisticated and layered novel about sisters, betrayal, love, and climate change, for readers of The Dutch House and The Most Fun We Ever Had.
From Lynn Steger Strong, critically acclaimed author of Flight, a sophisticated and layered novel about sisters, betrayal, love, and climate change, for readers of The Dutch House and The Most Fun We Ever Had.
In late 2020, my family and I found ourselves back in the small Florida town where both my husband and I grew up. Tumult and ruptures, he’d been laid off and we’d had to give up our Brooklyn apartment. I was teaching remotely, and our kids were attending their New York school online. Our family of four moved into my in-laws’ two-bedroom one bath house. I love Florida but had not been back for an extended period in years. We took our kids to the beach, on the little boat my husband’s dad had built to wander the mangroves and the spoil islands my husband wandered growing up, on long walks through the Everglades. I went for runs every day and tried to imbibe, understand, feel in my bones, on my skin, how impossibly beautiful so much of the place is. I couldn’t look at the beauty without also thinking about how precarious it all is, right on the water, below sea-level, so much of the wildness already destroyed to make space for more and more developments, so much more danger as storms become more intense.
I was thinking, too, about striving, ambition. Approaching middle age, having had small successes, I had yet to have a stretch in my grownup life in which I had fewer than three jobs at once, when I wasn’t rushing from one thing to the next, calling to my kids to hurry up. And then suddenly, so much less movement, and then suddenly, this strange space and time to realize how very bad I am at being quiet, still. How grateful I was, for that stretch of time with all that beauty and these people that I loved.
Books, for me, come from a strange alchemy of paying very close and careful attention, always working to be (and perhaps unfortunately not able to stop being) as porous and open to the sensations of the world as possible; it’s asking lots of questions, and also forcing yourself into spaces of not knowing, of discomfort, in order to take the reader somewhere you maybe even haven’t had the courage to go in your own life.
The Float Test started from questions around the precarious, complicated, intense beauty and complexity of this place where we grew up, this place to which we had so suddenly and unexpectedly returned. It grew and richened inside the question of how and when and if we ever might have an opportunity to not always be striving, to not always be working to muscle our way toward some perhaps unachievable sense that we have made it, are now safe. How all the striving impedes or complicates our ability to see and care for one another, how difficult it is, especially, to learn to see and love the people and the places that you grew up learning to strive and fight against and with.
