{"id":64286,"date":"2022-11-01T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-11-01T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.themainemag.com\/?p=64286"},"modified":"2022-11-01T09:36:36","modified_gmt":"2022-11-01T13:36:36","slug":"the-elastic-nature-of-a-family-in-flight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themainemag.com\/the-elastic-nature-of-a-family-in-flight\/","title":{"rendered":"The Elastic Nature of a Family in \u201cFlight\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I suddenly realized that I wrote a quiet novel about family,\u201d says Lynn Steger Strong, author of the new novel Flight, out this month from HarperCollins. Yet each of Strong\u2019s novels is, in some way, about family. Her first, Hold Still<\/em>, followed the story of a mother and daughter repairing their bond after a tragedy. Her second, Want, was fueled by rage and followed a couple\u2019s struggle to raise children in Brooklyn after filing for bankruptcy. Want is narrated by its main character and centers on her personal experience. Perhaps what\u2019s different about Flight<\/em>, Strong\u2019s third book, is that it takes a broader view, examining the dynamics among members of an extended family. \u201cThe project of the book was the organism, the group, and not the individual,\u201d says Strong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Flight<\/em> takes place at Christmastime in a family that has just lost its matriarch, Helen. Her three children and their spouses, with Helen\u2019s grandchildren, convene on one of the couple\u2019s homes in upstate New York, where the world is frozen over, to discuss what to do with Helen\u2019s house down in Florida, their childhood home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Strong\u2019s omniscient narration leads us through each person\u2019s experience of the reunion. She says writing, for her, is a way to explore the elasticity of language. \u201cEverybody in this book inhabits the word \u2018family\u2019 in very different ways,\u201d she says. For Tess, Helen\u2019s daughter-in-law, \u201cfamily is scary and painful.\u201d Helen\u2019s children, Henry, Martin, and Kate, adored their mother but now find them-selves grieving her in different ways. Setting the book during the holidays \u201cwas a useful way to ask this group of people to recalibrate their relationship to this word.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Strong wanted to celebrate the joys of parenting as well as confront its complications in an age of climate change, growing awareness of neurodivergence, and economic struggle. \u201cParenting is this process of making peace with a complete loss of control,\u201d she says. \u201cIn terms of wanting to do it best, there\u2019s never a clear path. It also never stops being profoundly enriching.\u201d The parents in Flight may contrast one another in their approaches to discipline, medication, diet, or education, but what emerges is not a hierarchy of best practices for parents but rather a spectrum of ways to love your children. \u201cYou have the extraordinary privilege of loving them on the exact terms that they are,\u201d says Strong. In the book, two of Helen\u2019s grandchildren are neurodivergent, but only one set of parents has chosen to medicate their child, despite fearing the slippery slope of overmedication; the other can\u2019t afford to. One parent never lets her children go to bed without bathing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Quinn is a young single mother raising her daughter Maddie under state supervision after an accidental overdose. Her social worker is Alice, the wife of Henry; their upstate house serves as the book\u2019s setting. Unable to have biological children, Alice grows abnormally invested in Maddie. \u201cEverything I write is to some extent about caretaking,\u201d says Strong. \u201cI\u2019m always interested in the boundaries and borders that we establish, or fail to establish, in relationships that aren\u2019t clear.\u201d Quinn was a teenage mother who ran away from her own complicated family to keep custody of her daughter. She cannot afford childcare. \u201cQuinn is absolutely the product of some deeply broken systems, but she\u2019s also an acting, thinking human,\u201d says Strong. \u201cI need her humanity to mean as much to you as everybody else\u2019s.\u201d Quinn isn\u2019t a victim; she has agency and makes her own choices. Just like the reader\u2019s, some of them are better than others. \u201cThe book is interested in why and how we make choices, and how we live inside of those choices,\u201d says Strong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAll of these characters, maybe most of all Alice and Quinn, came from circling the word \u2018shame,\u2019\u201d says Strong. Two other characters she alludes to are Kate and Josh, who lived on money from Josh\u2019s family until he lost it all on bad investments. With two children, they\u2019re hoping to move into Helen\u2019s house, Kate\u2019s childhood home in Florida, if only they can convince the family to let them. Tess thinks they don\u2019t deserve it. Henry, an artist who makes work about climate change, would rather demolish Helen\u2019s house\u2014in need of repairs and destined to be underwater soon anyway\u2014and donate her land to the state wildlife agency. \u201cI think the fight over Helen’s house to some extent is meant to be a little bit absurd,\u201d says Strong. \u201cI look around at other parents, and everyone is so deeply mired in a sense of a future that doesn\u2019t exist anymore,\u201d due to the cascading effects of climate change, \u201cbut they can\u2019t get out of it.\u201d She relates to this reality-blindness herself. So what if Helen\u2019s house will be gone by the time the kids grow up? Like Kate and Josh, \u201cI want my kids to have a beautiful childhood,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Flight<\/em> is an easy book to settle into; the reader wants to be a part of this family, even with its challenges. Jealousy, blame, grief, and all the myriad ways that children can think of to scare their parents intervene on this family reunion. Yet, they still decorate the Christmas tree and share memories of Helen. They band together when a child goes missing. \u201cIt was really important to me that each of these characters drive me a little bit nuts at the beginning,\u201d Strong says, \u201cand that I find a way to love them and find value in their point of view, by the end.\u201d Patience and compassion for people real and fictional are muscles that parenting has helped her exercise, she says: \u201cBecoming a parent and loving my children has only enriched and strengthened my work.\u201d It\u2019s shown her a greater capacity for love, even as the material circumstances of her life as an artist mean money is sometimes lean. Love is the most important resource for any family to have, and the family in Flight has plenty of it. It comes through every page.<\/p>\n\n\n\t\t

\n \t\t\n
\n\t\n\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t
\n\t\t\t \n\t\t\t \t\t\t <\/div>\n\t\t\t \n\t\t\t \n\t\t\t