A book about two sisters trying to make it in New York City, Alexandra Tanner’s debut novel Worry is deadpan, quirky, and flinchingly realistic. You will drive yourself crazy trying to decide if you love, hate, or begrudgingly relate to these two women before settling on the fact that it is in fact possible to feel all three of these things at once. I was so thrilled to chat with Alexandra and learn more about how her book came to be.
—Maddie Grimes, Parnassus bookseller
Maddie Grimes: First of all, huge congrats on your debut! I adored this book, and I’m excited for more readers to be able to get their hands on it. Even though Worry is your first novel, you’ve had your writing published in other forms for quite a while. Does putting this novel out into the world feel different than things you’ve done before?
Alexandra Tanner: Thanks Maddie! It’s an exciting time, and it does feel different from any other part of my career so far—when you’re writing and publishing shorter pieces, you spend maybe a few weeks working really intensely on something and thinking about it a lot and sometimes getting to talk to a few people about it, and then it’s kind of out of your head. With a novel there’s so much to do over such a long period of time, and so many people to discuss the work with in all these different ways, and your relationship to the project goes through so much change—sometimes you feel close to it, and sometimes you have a little more distance; you discover new regrets, and new points of pride. I guess the biggest difference is that my writing is beginning to feel like it’s the center of my day-to-day life lately rather than something I have to steal away time for. It’s been very cool to see that shift start to happen, I’ve been waiting and hoping for it for a long time.
MG: More than almost any other narrator I’ve read, Jules effortlessly came to life in my head as I was reading. Was it difficult to pin down her voice as a narrator? How much of yourself do you see in Jules?
AT: That means the world to hear. I think nailing Jules’s voice was difficult in that she’s a really negative force, and to capture what I wanted to about her I had to attune myself to my own cruelest thoughts, my own most ungenerous reading of the world. But it was also really cathartic to speak through her. I drew so many of the little things that happen throughout the book directly from conversations and experiences I was having in my own life. So if something upset me or scared me or otherwise took up a lot of emotional space in my mind, I found I could kind of process it by putting whatever my most extreme feeling about it was on the page and assigning it to her—then I’d feel better emotionally, even though she was sort of spiraling out. I could be a voyeur of a different version of myself. The things that ate me up inside became the things that fed Jules, and that made me feel a greater degree of power over and relief from my own fears and anxieties and hatreds.
MG: The heart of this novel is the complicated sister relationship between Jules and Poppy. Even though I don’t have a sister, I still found myself relating Jules and Poppy’s dynamic to my relationships with other women in my life, and I think a lot of readers will feel the same way. Was it difficult in your writing to convey those toxic and fraught moments while still making it clear that Jules and Poppy do genuinely care for each other?
AT: What I set out to do in writing Jules and Poppy was to sort of ignore traditional stakes—I wanted readers to have the sense that these are two people who are, at the end of the day, unconditionally devoted to each other. So the question of the novel for me was never about whether there’d be something that would cause them to fall out of one another’s lives; it was more about watching them decide who they were going to be to each other, and how much of themselves they were willing to give. Family stories hold all these questions about fate, authenticity, the self, free will, entwinement—your family can be a tremendous oppressive force, or it can be a kind of lifeboat; family relationships are intimate, instinctual, scary, freeing. I wanted to try to observe how all that baggage can make something as small as deciding who’s going to carry the groceries home or who’s going to walk the dog into a very serious drama. I don’t know that it was difficult from a craft perspective, but I would absolutely get caught in these big emotional roundabouts with Jules and Poppy as I was writing them into opposite corners again and again, trying to make them feel the weight of all their history: I saw why each of them was right and wrong, I wanted them both to win.
MG: I am hesitant to admit how much of myself I saw in Jules’s obsessive “Instagram mommy” check-ins. What compelled you to make this a part of her character (and can you offer me any reassurance that I’m not the only person who also partakes in this particular type of doom scrolling)?
AT: There were a couple reasons that scrolling became such a significant part of the book—before I started writing or even really thinking about this story, I knew I wanted to write something that would closely describe how it felt to move around the internet every day, tracking patterns and activity on a granular level. I’d envisioned doing a fragmented piece or a longform essay or something, but it felt more satisfying to attach the writing I was doing about social media to a fuller narrative and have the chance to have it mirror what was going on in a set of characters’ emotional lives. I was also just noticing, throughout 2019 and into 2020, how much time I was spending numbing out on my phone—I’d kind of let myself become an iPad baby, I’ve never had good willpower. I was in a huge mommy-blogger phase, totally absorbed by finding these bizarre accounts and checking in on them every day. Their drama was so real to me. When they’d get kicked out of Wal-Mart for refusing to wear shoes or when they’d be sharing pictures of their children in comas or when they’d be posting twenty-slide stories about how the earth was flat—it felt like getting crazy gossip every day about people I really knew. They scared me, but I also had genuine fun with them. I thought Jules, who has a more intense and destructive personality than I do, would be driven to the edge of herself by them in a way that would be high-stakes and funny but also scary to dramatize. I still enjoy a nice long doom scroll. But I’m off the mommies.
MG: I think you did such an impressive job at using the setting to add dimension in this novel. How much did having Worry set in New York impact the story you were trying to tell?
AT: I’ve lived in New York for a decade now, and to me it’s always been a place of real emotional and physical and experiential extremes. Every time you leave the house you see something delightful or terrifying—sometimes you see both things within the length of a block—and so while it’s home, it’s not necessarily the place where I’ve felt the most stability or security in my own skin. Or where I’ve felt most tethered to reality. You have a sense of anonymity and smallness living there—just like with family, that can be either really freeing or really frightening. I can’t imagine Worry taking place anywhere else; Brooklyn especially as a setting just enlivened the emotional atmosphere I was trying to create and really made me feel like I could get away putting with the impossible and the uncanny right on the page, because those things are part of everyday life here.
MG: And finally, we always end with this question: what is your favorite thing about indie bookstores?
AT: I love how indies reflect their communities; how you can get such a strong sense of a place by visiting its bookstores. I’m thinking of Firestorm Co-op in West Asheville, or Books & Books in Coral Gables, or Unnameable Books in my neighborhood, Prospect Heights—even if you’re just a visitor, you feel this immediate intimacy and familiarity: you understand who the booksellers are, who their neighbors are, what the community is about. I love when an indie has a big local interest section or a healthy used books situation best of all—that’s when I really know a bookstore is going to be a portal into the hearts and lives that surround it.
Alexandra Tanner’s debut novel, Worry, is on shelves now! You can get your copy from Parnassus here.
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