In Wanting, writer-editors Margot Kahn and Kelly McMasters have collected 33 deeply intimate and thoughtful essays by women writers on the range of what constitutes desire. In "Sex in the Suburbs," Angela Cardinale relays the yearning and loneliness of dating during the pandemic. In "An SUV Named Desire," Jennifer De Leon digs into her longtime goal of owning an SUV and its ties to her experience growing up in a working-class immigrant family. "Allergic" by Tara Conklin and "Splitting the World Open" by Lisa Taddeo take a more deconstructive view: exploring what it means to watch desire deplete itself or observing the destructive effects that desire and envy can have on compassion, respectively.
Wanting is at its best when it's demonstrating the wide scope of what desire can mean, what forms it can take and what its object might be. The styles here are wistful and tender one minute, razor-sharp and raw the next. The tendency for these stories to bend the rules of desire and to see it as a fluid, unpredictable and dynamic presence in life is perhaps most obvious in Elisa Albert's darkly funny and cutting "On Not Getting What I Wanted." Ostensibly about her struggles to get pregnant a second time, the essay soon morphs into a much more flexible metaphor for the persistence of wanting and wanting's uncanny bedfellow: consumption. "Wanting's a tricky bitch," Albert writes. "It waxes and wanes.... Wanting is like a weed; it self-sows." Wanting, in this collection, is not just a physical or emotional state; it's a complex cultural, economic and political state of being. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor