Worry: A Novel
Insidious millennial malaise and the exhaustion of performative activism are contrasted through the story of two sisters who overstay their welcome in one another’s orbit. The dialogue will split you, gut you, and stitch you back up again.
Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
A "dryly witty" (New Yorker) and "fabulously revealing" (The New York Times Book Review) debut about two siblings-turned-roommates navigating an absurd world on the verge of calamity—a Seinfeldian novel of existentialism and sisterhood.
It’s March of 2019, and twenty-eight-year-old Jules Gold—anxious, artistically frustrated, and internet-obsessed—has been living alone in the apartment she once shared with the man she thought she’d marry when her younger sister Poppy comes to crash. Indefinitely. Poppy, a year and a half out from a suicide attempt only Jules knows about, searches for work and meaning in Brooklyn while Jules spends her days hate-scrolling the feeds of Mormon mommy bloggers and waiting for life to happen.
Then the hives that’ve plagued Poppy since childhood flare up. Jules’s uterus turns against her. Poppy brings home a maladjusted rescue dog named Amy Klobuchar. The girls’ mother, a newly devout Messianic Jew, starts falling for the same deep-state conspiracy theories as Jules’s online mommies. Jules, halfheartedly struggling to scrape her way to the source of her ennui, slowly and cruelly comes to blame Poppy for her own insufficiencies as a friend, a writer, and a sister. And Amy Klobuchar might have rabies. As the year shambles on and a new decade looms near, a disastrous trip home to Florida forces Jules and Poppy—comrades, competitors, constant fixtures in each other’s lives—to ask themselves what they want their futures to look like, and whether they’ll spend them together or apart.
Deadpan, dark, and brutally funny, Worry is a sharp portrait of two sisters enduring a dread-filled American moment from a nervy new voice in contemporary fiction.
Praise for Worry: A Novel
"Dryly witty . . . highlights absurdities of contemporary culture and the consequences of self-absorption." —New Yorker
“Fabulously revealing. . . . The novel runs on an engine that relentlessly converts suffering, usually of the inner-turmoil variety, into comedic relief. . . . Some stories give you the unvarnished truth, some the varnished one. Worry is generous and wise enough to give both.” —Hannah Gold, New York Times Book Review
"A portrait of sisterly love that is both hilarious and deeply disturbing." —Ailsa Chang, NPR
"If a Big Sister Manifesto did exist, one that captured the hypocrisies of the role along with the heroism, the joy along with the pain, then Alexandra Tanner has come as close as it gets with her debut novel, Worry. . . . Like Ferrante and Heti before her, Tanner has constructed a layered Künstlerroman, an artist’s novel about two artists coming to maturity." —Leah Abrams, Los Angeles Review of Books
“A deadpan comedic novel that will have you laughing aloud as you read and then—at other times—wanting to throw the book across the room in frustration at its characters. . . . With a focus on sisterhood, life in the modern era, ambition, and ennui—with a side of existential dread just for fun—this hilariously absurdist novel will have you relating to the character's anxiety a bit too much, even as you can't put it down . . . [an] addictive read.” —Isaac Fitzgerald, The Today Show
"Tanner’s domestic novel is a study in the conditions that might prompt a person to self-isolate, even in a pandemic-free world: internet addiction, delivery and dating apps, an epidemic of loneliness, the bare fact of anxiety [which is itself] an ouroboros: anxiety breeds illness, and illness more anxiety. Their apartment complex used to be a Jewish hospital, and for these two afflicted Jewish American Princesses, it sort of still is . . . [Worry is] a bitingly funny, extremely online novel about sisterhood . . . [which], not unlike the internet, is its own universe." —Washington Post
"Alert: A genuinely funny book has entered the chat. . . . This debut novel’s observations about life in 2019—and in your twenties—are darkly hilarious and almost too spot on." —theSkimm
"Limning the absurdity of our internet-addled, dread-filled moment, Tanner establishes herself as a formidable novelist." —The Millions
"Worry is exacting and hilarious, the startling, familiar shock of seeing your own slightly warped face reflected back to you when your iPhone dies from hours of scrolling. It feels both like an anthropological time capsule of turn-of-the-decade culture and a prescient crystal ball of our current, utterly droll hell. . . . But at its core, Worry is a novel about sisters and the love they share despite being given access to each other’s emotional nuclear codes." —NYLON
"Dark, funny . . . a haunting snapshot of contemporary life." —Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"A tragicomic portrait of urban millennial life, Worry is a timely mashup of Ottessa Moshfegh's desensitized characters and Sally Rooney's attention to complex social (de)attachment." —Shelf Awareness
"Gripping . . . Worry contains both the chaos of Lena Dunham’s Girls and the neurotic humor of Curb Your Enthusiasm." —Chicago Review of Books
"A disturbingly relatable tale." —Jezebel
"Could very well be the Great Millennial Novel." —Debutiful
"Worry is the book of the year for hot Jewish girls—and everyone else." —Hey Alma
"Reading this feels a lot like hanging out with a sister . . . It’s a bit like looking in a fun house mirror at times, sometimes to my horror, but always to my entertainment." —Megan Spurrell, Condé Nast Traveler
"[A] mordant debut . . . comical and savage. . . With unflinching honesty, Tanner captures the claustrophobia of 21st-century young adulthood." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Worry is the novel of the online generation. . . . With wit and brilliant insight, Tanner explores the nuances particular to sisterhood." —Electric Literature
"Perfect for fans of Elif Batuman and Ottessa Moshfegh, Worry encapsulates a uniquely millennial malaise." —PureWow
“Worry writes toward truth in the time of the internet, it uncovers the absolute horror of ‘buying things,’ and it does what novels are meant to do: hauntingly display the dark and familiar sides of human behavior.” —Kiley Reid, New York Times bestselling author of Such a Fun Age and Come and Get It
"The kind of book you will constantly be reading out loud to others. . . . This hilarious, unremittingly jaundiced depiction of modern young adulthood hits rare extremes of both funny and sad." —Kirkus (starred review)
“Fans of Jen Beagin and Melissa Broder will appreciate Tanner's style. . . . A stinging yet joyful story about life playing out online or nowhere.” —Booklist
"I've spent my whole life desperately trying not to say the stuff that comes out of these characters' mouths." —Tony Tulathimutte, author of Private Citizens
“A furiously funny, delirious anxiety spiral of a book—a novel of ideas with a bad case of insomnia.” —Hilary Leichter, author of Temporary and Terrace Story
"I want to make all of my friends read Worry and then take them to a bar so we can fight about which sister is right and which is worse and which is moral and which is me." —Kelsey McKinney, host of Normal Gossip and author of God Spare the Girls
"A dark and laugh-out-loud funny debut about sisterhood, internet poisoning, and suspecting that there is something incurably wrong with you but not wanting to know what it is (relatable!)." —Ruth Madievsky, author of All-Night Pharmacy
"This book is like popping an Adderall and discovering the beauty of your food processor." —Beth Morgan, author of A Touch of Jen
"One of the most exciting literary debuts—and just one of the flat-out best novels—in memory." —David Burr Gerrard, author of The Epiphany Machine
