Alexandra Tanner

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.

A Novel

Worry

Lindsay

Why is it, I think while getting stoned out of my mind off Poppy's shitty vape pen, that in this life, in our simulation, in whatever terrifying meaningless thing it is we're all doing every day, we can only create infinite and infinitely worse versions of the things we already have, instead of good new things we need?

For me it's more about anthropology, about watching Gage to see if he's changed, to see if I can make him feel familiar again. We were together for four years. It's mystifying, not even a year after our breakup, to find that four years wasn't really anything. It always felt like we were just around the corner from getting married but neither of use could ever seem to work up the motivation. Before Gage I'd thought that relationships only ended when something huge and irredeemable happened, something that totally wrecked you both, something that neither of you could move past. But at some point I realized relationships could just end. You could just feel done. 

Stas

I can make out the voice of Donald Trump leaking from her phone. […] «I hate that he’s, like, the funniest person in the world. Don’t you hate how fucking funny he is?»

i take back every bad thing i’ve thought about Poppy

I want to buy a sodastream, but Poppy doesn’t want to support Israeli apartheid

" You are fucking autistic, Poppy," I say, "if you think you're gonna be able to get Momnmy and Daddy to pay your rent." I feel bad right away, but not quite bad enough to apologize, or to stop.

"I don't know," Poppy says. She sets Amy back down. She looks at me. Something's going on behind her eyes. "I'm fine." She won't let me in. I wish I could claw her face off, get to her soul, understand who she is, feel safe in thinking I know her.

the dad is just the cutest little man aww

There's a silence. Then: "So, any big plans for the weekend, angel pie?"

Worry quotes

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