A trip to Italy reignites a woman's desires to disastrous effect in
this dark ode to womanhood, death, and sex
To cool-headed, fastidious Pricilla Messing, Italy will be an escape, a
brief glimpse of freedom from a life that's starting to feel like one
long decline.
Rescued from the bedside of her difficult mother, forty-something Cilla
finds herself called away to Rome to keep an eye on her wayward teenage
niece, Hannah. But after years of caregiving, babysitting is the last
thing Cilla wants to do. Instead she throws herself into Hannah's
youthful, heedless world―drinking, dancing, smoking―relishing the heady
atmosphere of the Italian summer. After years of feeling used up and
overlooked, Cilla feels like she's coming back to life. But being so
close to Hannah brings up complicated memories, making Cilla restless
and increasingly reckless, and a dangerous flirtation with a teenage boy
soon threatens to send her into a tailspin.
With the sharp-edged insight of Ottessa Moshfegh and the taut seduction
of Patricia Highsmith, The Worst Kind of Want is a dark exploration of
the inherent dangers of being a woman. In her unsettling follow-up to
Catalina, Liska Jacobs again delivers hypnotic literary noir about a
woman whose unruly desires and troubled past push her to the brink of
disaster.
