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2 weeks ago | 
lithub.com | Lynn Steger Strong
Thomas Bernhard’s biographer claimed that he masturbated in front of the mirror. True or not, it’s a great image. Bernhard wrote what might, at first glance, feel like the same thing over and over—what might, lord help us all, be referred to as autofiction—misanthropic ranting men, purportedly like him. Most have lung diseases; Bernhard almost died of a lung disease.
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2 weeks ago | 
nytimes.com | Jen Doll |Lynn Steger Strong
THE FLOAT TEST, by Lynn Steger StrongWriters are the worst, am I right? As a writer, I can say this. Whether we're following in the grand "everything is copy" tradition of Nora Ephron or quietly "borrowing" other people's stories, we cannot be trusted. But what happens when the writer is your beloved sister, and your whole family is kind of a disaster, with years of snubs, betrayals, and accidental and purposeful misdeeds between everyone, many of them aired in print by the writer?
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3 weeks ago | 
romper.com | Lynn Steger Strong
Once, in town to help me take care of our 6-month-old while her son was traveling, my mother-in-law and I watched a movie about a woman whose dad is dying. Nodding toward the baby asleep on my chest, she leaned in and whispered to me: “You don’t want her to have to deal with your death all by herself.”She was kidding, I think. But 14 months later, I gave birth again. It was intense, insane, having two kids under 2 in a tiny New York apartment.
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Nov 11, 2024 | 
theatlantic.com | Lynn Steger Strong
Writers are great gossips. Get one or three of us alone at a party; add a few gin or whiskey drinks. Ask a question about somebody’s professor from grad school, or about that (married) handsome writer who slept with that other (married) writer at a conference. Lord help the authors whose group texts get subpoenaed and then printed for the world to see.
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Nov 7, 2024 | 
newyorker.com | Lynn Steger Strong |“The Float Test.”
As Hurricane Milton barrelled toward Florida last month, I taught a three-hour Zoom class and tried not to refresh my phone for updates. I grew up in Florida, and my parents, along with my sister and her family, still live on the Atlantic Coast, a hundred and fifty miles from where Milton hit. All day, I’d responded to worried friends, telling them my family was fine, not their side of the state. But the mass of the storm was so big.
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Oct 29, 2024 | 
thecut.com | Lynn Steger Strong
Photo-Illustration: The Cut I have an old picture of my kids from October 28, 2016, the day the Comey letter dropped. They’re 2 and 4. We’re at the park. Both wear cheap sunglasses and clutch birthday-party goodie bags. Lollipops hang from their mouths. They jut their hips and grin. I love it because they’re adorable, because time has passed now and they’re big, because I still wish that I might have them infinitely.
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Sep 22, 2024 | 
esquiresg.com | Lynn Steger Strong
Gillian Anderson isn’t a sex therapist, but for four years, she played one on television. From 2019 to 2023, she starred as Sex Education’s Dr. Jean Milburn, a lusty, complicated, sometimes manipulative (see: human) woman, bumbling and grasping through midlife while single-parenting her teenage son, Otis. But even though the role was pure fiction, something about Milburn’s funny, loving energy made people want to talk to Anderson about sex.
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Sep 11, 2024 | 
aol.com | Lynn Steger Strong
September 12, 2024 at 5:00 AMGillian Anderson Can Tell You What Women WantTRUNK ARCHIVES"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." Gillian Anderson isn’t a sex therapist, but for four years, she played one on television. From 2019 to 2023, she played Sex Education’s Dr. Jean Milburn, a lusty, complicated, sometimes manipulative (see also human) woman, bumbling and grasping through mid-life while single-parenting her teenage son, Otis.
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Aug 20, 2024 | 
mdpi.com | Kourtney Byrd |Lynn Steger Strong |Salome Amissah-Essel |Cecilia Obeng
All articles published by MDPI are made immediately available worldwide under an open access license. No special permission is required to reuse all or part of the article published by MDPI, including figures and tables. For articles published under an open access Creative Common CC BY license, any part of the article may be reused without permission provided that the original article is clearly cited. For more information, please refer to https://www.mdpi.com/openaccess.
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Jul 22, 2024 | 
theatlantic.com | Lynn Steger Strong
When Ezra Pound said “Make it new,” he was not talking about teen soaps. So much of their appeal lies in their predictable storytelling and immediately recognizable characters: the beautiful girl group with the just-complicated-enough underbelly, the standoffish and misunderstood boys who’ll fall in love when the right girls come their way. Even Beverly Hills, 90210—which popularized, and arguably remains the apotheosis of, the genre—was bound by the formulaic demands of network television.
