How She Did It: On Penelope Fitzgerald, Writing, and Women at Work
Fitzgerald was ground down, I imagine, consumed by how to take care of her family. This didn’t make her any less the thinker, writer, reader, that she was.

how does she do it?
The Bookshop—Bookshop,
The Bookshop,
Offshore.
Each morning, she dressed the children smartly, and carted them the twenty minutes or two hours of buses and trains it took, depending on the location of their most recent shelter, to get them to school.
She taught at high schools and cram schools and a school for child actors. She wrote plays and children’s stories and essays, whatever she could to feed her kids. She was ground down, I imagine, in that specific way of being wholly consumed by how next one might find a way to take care of one’s family. This didn’t make her any less the thinker, writer, reader, that she was.
How does she do it?
how
The Bookshop,
Lynn Steger Strong's first novel, Hold Still, was released by Liveright/WW Norton in March 2016. She received an MFA from Columbia University and her non-fiction has been published in Guernica, LARB, Elle.com, Catapult, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. She teaches both fiction and non-fiction writing at Columbia University, Fairfield University, and the Pratt Institute. Lynn's second novel, Want, is forthcoming from Henry Holt in spring 2020.
Enter your email address to receive notifications for author Lynn Steger Strong
Success!
Confirmation link sent to your email to add you to notification list for author Lynn Steger Strong
More by this author
The Intimacy of Teaching Creative Writing
Enjoy this conversation between Lynn Steger Strong and Laura Spence-Ash and read novel excerpts from her 12-Month Generator students in this graduation showcase.
Making Space for Writing in 2020
A new life can grow inside a book once you realize you’re not making it all for yourself.
So, You’ve Finished Your Book
When my students finished a draft, all I wanted them to do was sit inside of it for longer than was comfortable. To acknowledge and celebrate what they’d accomplished.
More in this series
In Pursuit of Prodigy: The Last Samurai and Me
“Books are the cause of so many bad ideas.”
All That Glitters: On The Clique Novels and My First Lessons in White Privilege
While kids my age were falling in love with the fantastical, I did not. I wanted to read about rich white girls behaving badly.
Reading Stephen King’s ‘It’ As a Child Confused My Sense of Justice
Like Pennywise the Clown, I too was stealing childhood from those who had more of it than I did.