Worry
A Novel
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER * Named a Best Book of the Year by the New Yorker, NPR, Vogue, the Washington Post, Electric Lit, and more!
A “dryly witty” (The New Yorker) and “fabulously revealing” (The New York Times Book Review) debut that follows two sisters-turned-roommates navigating an absurd world on the verge of calamity—a Seinfeldian novel for readers of Ottessa Moshfegh and Sally Rooney.
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.
“A tragicomic portrait of urban millennial life” (Shelf Awareness), Worry is a “riotously funny and wryly existential” (Harper’s Bazaar) novel of sisterhood from a nervy new voice in contemporary fiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Tanner's mordant debut, two sisters deal with their anxiety and depression while rooming together. Jules, 28, is less than thrilled when her younger sister, Poppy, moves into her Brooklyn apartment—temporarily, Poppy assures her. The sisters were close while growing up in their Jewish household in South Florida, and Poppy looked up to Jules. After Poppy finished college, however, she sank into a depression and moved back home. Recently, Poppy's mental health seemed to improve substantially, and she announced plans to settle in New York City. Only Jules knows that before arriving in Brooklyn, Poppy attempted suicide. The pair bicker constantly, in a manner that is both comical and savage (Poppy throws a toenail clipping at Jules during a fight). As things go well for Poppy—she gets along with Jules's boyfriend, finds a job, and plans to adopt a dog—Jules feels threatened. Anxious about being stuck in her dead-end job as a study guide editor, she soothes herself by "hate-stalk" the "tradfem" mommy bloggers on her Instagram feed (one of whom claims to have a "mom-crush" on her "mini-boyfriend": her newborn). Though Tanner finds plenty of easy targets for Jules to mock, she never sacrifices the psychological acuity of the character's sharply portrayed angst and mean-spiritedness. With unflinching honesty, Tanner captures the claustrophobia of 21st-century young adulthood.