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Table of Contents
About The Book
NATIONAL BESTSELLER * Named a Best Book of the Year by the New Yorker, the Washington Post, 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 “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.
Reading Group Guide
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WORRY Reading Group Guide
This reading group guide for Worry includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.
Introduction
Worry follows Jules and Poppy Gold, twenty-something sisters-turned-roommates living together in 2019 Brooklyn for the first time since childhood. While relearning how to cohabitate, the sisters navigate Internet addiction, the pressures of work, a slew of physical and mental illnesses, secular Jewish identity amid a rising tide of on- and offline antisemitism, the adoption of a maladjusted dog named Amy Klobuchar, and their mother’s descent into right-wing conspiracies over the course of a tumultuous year. When a Thanksgiving trip home ends in shambles, Jules and Poppy are forced to confront not only the current state of their relationship, but also what the future holds for them—as individuals and as sisters.
Topics & Questions for Discussion
1. From mommy bloggers to tradfems to anti-vaxxers to flat-earthers, Jules engages with a very specific kind of online community. How would you characterize these influencers and why do you think she is obsessed with them?
2. The vagaries of sisterhood are a major preoccupation of the novel. Tanner writes, “[Poppy] 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. . . . If I were still writing, I’d write a shitty short story about us . . . and in it there’d be a sentence like: Having a sister is looking in a cheap mirror: what’s there is you, but unfamiliar and ugly for it” (page 165). How does this help you understand the Gold sisters better? Would Poppy describe Jules the same way? If you have a sibling, does this thought resonate with your own experience of that relationship?
3. Poppy’s recurring, debilitating hives are an ongoing source of strife, but also something that brings the sisters together. Consider these flare-ups—do you think they have a symbolic quality? How do the sisters’ struggles with mental health also impact their relationship?
4. Another theme in the novel is a deep sense of disconnection with those around us, and Tanner often dramatizes this via the texting habits of her characters. For example, when we see Jules composing and sending texts, there is often a marked difference between how she’s feeling and what she actually ends up saying. Why do you think this is? At points in the novel, Jules and Poppy get into major arguments that only end or resolve over text. What do you make of this?
5. Discuss the entrance of Amy Klobuchar into the sisters’ lives. How do the circumstances of her adoption and subsequent presence impact their relationship? Consider this exchange between Poppy and Jules after Amy pees her bed: “‘All the websites say dogs never pee their own beds because it fouls their safest space.’ ‘Well,’ I say, looking at Amy . . . I guess we got the one dog who wants to foul her safest space’” (page 188). Do you think Jules and Poppy are each other’s safest space? Why do they so often “foul” this space with petty cruelties?
6. After attending a performance of a Greek tragedy that has been updated with references to social media, Poppy “whines about the state of American theater, trying to put words to the reason why the play was so intensely bad. We hate big ideas and big emotions. The Greeks felt but we don’t feel. We have TV in our hands. Art is dead. . . . Poppy’s ideas about dead art, to me, are just as numbing as the idea in the play . . . Dead art is everywhere. Dead art is my life” (pages 64–65). Discuss this sentiment, which comes up throughout the novel—to what extent do you agree with Poppy? To what extent do you empathize with Jules? What do you think she means when she writes “Dead art is my life”?
7. Consider the role of work in the novel. What do Jules’s experiences at BookSmarts and Starlab tell us about her? What about Poppy’s experiences at the private school where she works? Discuss the multi-level marketing schemes Jules’s mommies are caught up in, and her comment “All these women who don’t have to work, out there working!” (page 234). What do you think drives them to participate in these schemes?
8. A residual source of tension between the sisters is the expensive, nonreturnable bed Jules unwittingly bought for Poppy while high on sedatives. Poppy refuses to use it, opting instead for an old air mattress. How does the bed reflect larger issues in Poppy’s own life and her relationship with Jules? What problems of her own is Jules projecting onto Poppy?
9. Discuss the ways Jules and Poppy’s secular Jewish identity is explored in the novel. Revisit the SodaStream argument (page 15) and the sisters’ search for their great-grandparents’ graves (pages 194–200). How do these scenes speak to each other, and what do you think Tanner is trying to illustrate? What was your response to the moments of antisemitism they face, online and off?
10. Consider Poppy’s declaration that “Love isn’t really part of my worldview” (page 108) and Jules’s subsequent insistence that their views on love are not as different as Poppy would like to think: “You’re queer, it’s not like we live on different planets. . . . We’re, like, literally the same person” (page 109). How much do you think their worldviews and experiences actually differ? To what extent does Jules give space to Poppy’s queerness?
11. How does the sisters’ disastrous Thanksgiving trip help us understand them better, both as individuals and in their relationships with one another and the rest of their family?
12. Discuss the sisters’ often antagonistic relationship with their mother, Wendy. Consider this line from Poppy and Jules’s reply on page 251: “‘Why do we need her so much? Why do I feel like I need her so much?’ ‘Because all anyone wants is to be mothered. Taken care of.’” What other examples of mothering do we see in the book?
13. What was your reaction to the final scene of the novel and its ambiguous ending? What purpose do you think it served, and why do you think this is the note that the novel ended on?
14. The novel ends in late 2019, with 2020 looming large on the horizon. What do you think the new year—and the pandemic—hold for these characters?
15. Discuss the title of the novel, Worry. What did it mean to you before you started the novel? What does it mean to you now?
Enhance Your Book Club
1. Have everyone in your group share a kind of content or content creator that they feel compelled by despite not identifying or agreeing with them. What do each of you find compelling about it? What drives you to look, and look again, even if you don’t like what you see?
2. Read another novel that’s concerned with internet culture, such as Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This or Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts. How is the internet, and the main characters’ relationship with it, portrayed differently between these books?
3. Bring a favorite meme to share with the group, in the spirit of this moment from the novel: “‘Memes don’t matter, Poppy,’ I shout. Now I’m crying. Of course memes matter” (page 40).
4. Try writing a BookSmarts page for Worry, either individually or as a group.
This reading group guide for Worry includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.
Introduction
Worry follows Jules and Poppy Gold, twenty-something sisters-turned-roommates living together in 2019 Brooklyn for the first time since childhood. While relearning how to cohabitate, the sisters navigate Internet addiction, the pressures of work, a slew of physical and mental illnesses, secular Jewish identity amid a rising tide of on- and offline antisemitism, the adoption of a maladjusted dog named Amy Klobuchar, and their mother’s descent into right-wing conspiracies over the course of a tumultuous year. When a Thanksgiving trip home ends in shambles, Jules and Poppy are forced to confront not only the current state of their relationship, but also what the future holds for them—as individuals and as sisters.
Topics & Questions for Discussion
1. From mommy bloggers to tradfems to anti-vaxxers to flat-earthers, Jules engages with a very specific kind of online community. How would you characterize these influencers and why do you think she is obsessed with them?
2. The vagaries of sisterhood are a major preoccupation of the novel. Tanner writes, “[Poppy] 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. . . . If I were still writing, I’d write a shitty short story about us . . . and in it there’d be a sentence like: Having a sister is looking in a cheap mirror: what’s there is you, but unfamiliar and ugly for it” (page 165). How does this help you understand the Gold sisters better? Would Poppy describe Jules the same way? If you have a sibling, does this thought resonate with your own experience of that relationship?
3. Poppy’s recurring, debilitating hives are an ongoing source of strife, but also something that brings the sisters together. Consider these flare-ups—do you think they have a symbolic quality? How do the sisters’ struggles with mental health also impact their relationship?
4. Another theme in the novel is a deep sense of disconnection with those around us, and Tanner often dramatizes this via the texting habits of her characters. For example, when we see Jules composing and sending texts, there is often a marked difference between how she’s feeling and what she actually ends up saying. Why do you think this is? At points in the novel, Jules and Poppy get into major arguments that only end or resolve over text. What do you make of this?
5. Discuss the entrance of Amy Klobuchar into the sisters’ lives. How do the circumstances of her adoption and subsequent presence impact their relationship? Consider this exchange between Poppy and Jules after Amy pees her bed: “‘All the websites say dogs never pee their own beds because it fouls their safest space.’ ‘Well,’ I say, looking at Amy . . . I guess we got the one dog who wants to foul her safest space’” (page 188). Do you think Jules and Poppy are each other’s safest space? Why do they so often “foul” this space with petty cruelties?
6. After attending a performance of a Greek tragedy that has been updated with references to social media, Poppy “whines about the state of American theater, trying to put words to the reason why the play was so intensely bad. We hate big ideas and big emotions. The Greeks felt but we don’t feel. We have TV in our hands. Art is dead. . . . Poppy’s ideas about dead art, to me, are just as numbing as the idea in the play . . . Dead art is everywhere. Dead art is my life” (pages 64–65). Discuss this sentiment, which comes up throughout the novel—to what extent do you agree with Poppy? To what extent do you empathize with Jules? What do you think she means when she writes “Dead art is my life”?
7. Consider the role of work in the novel. What do Jules’s experiences at BookSmarts and Starlab tell us about her? What about Poppy’s experiences at the private school where she works? Discuss the multi-level marketing schemes Jules’s mommies are caught up in, and her comment “All these women who don’t have to work, out there working!” (page 234). What do you think drives them to participate in these schemes?
8. A residual source of tension between the sisters is the expensive, nonreturnable bed Jules unwittingly bought for Poppy while high on sedatives. Poppy refuses to use it, opting instead for an old air mattress. How does the bed reflect larger issues in Poppy’s own life and her relationship with Jules? What problems of her own is Jules projecting onto Poppy?
9. Discuss the ways Jules and Poppy’s secular Jewish identity is explored in the novel. Revisit the SodaStream argument (page 15) and the sisters’ search for their great-grandparents’ graves (pages 194–200). How do these scenes speak to each other, and what do you think Tanner is trying to illustrate? What was your response to the moments of antisemitism they face, online and off?
10. Consider Poppy’s declaration that “Love isn’t really part of my worldview” (page 108) and Jules’s subsequent insistence that their views on love are not as different as Poppy would like to think: “You’re queer, it’s not like we live on different planets. . . . We’re, like, literally the same person” (page 109). How much do you think their worldviews and experiences actually differ? To what extent does Jules give space to Poppy’s queerness?
11. How does the sisters’ disastrous Thanksgiving trip help us understand them better, both as individuals and in their relationships with one another and the rest of their family?
12. Discuss the sisters’ often antagonistic relationship with their mother, Wendy. Consider this line from Poppy and Jules’s reply on page 251: “‘Why do we need her so much? Why do I feel like I need her so much?’ ‘Because all anyone wants is to be mothered. Taken care of.’” What other examples of mothering do we see in the book?
13. What was your reaction to the final scene of the novel and its ambiguous ending? What purpose do you think it served, and why do you think this is the note that the novel ended on?
14. The novel ends in late 2019, with 2020 looming large on the horizon. What do you think the new year—and the pandemic—hold for these characters?
15. Discuss the title of the novel, Worry. What did it mean to you before you started the novel? What does it mean to you now?
Enhance Your Book Club
1. Have everyone in your group share a kind of content or content creator that they feel compelled by despite not identifying or agreeing with them. What do each of you find compelling about it? What drives you to look, and look again, even if you don’t like what you see?
2. Read another novel that’s concerned with internet culture, such as Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This or Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts. How is the internet, and the main characters’ relationship with it, portrayed differently between these books?
3. Bring a favorite meme to share with the group, in the spirit of this moment from the novel: “‘Memes don’t matter, Poppy,’ I shout. Now I’m crying. Of course memes matter” (page 40).
4. Try writing a BookSmarts page for Worry, either individually or as a group.
About The Author
Photograph © Sasha Fletcher
Alexandra Tanner is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor. She is a graduate of the MFA program at The New School and a recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, The Center for Fiction, and Spruceton Inn’s Artist Residency. Her writing appears in Granta, The New York Times Book Review, The Baffler, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Jewish Currents, among other outlets. Worry is her first novel.
Why We Love It
“Alexandra Tanner has all ten fingers on the pulse of the zeitgeist. This book captures our cultural moment in a way that has me looking over my shoulder and wondering if art imitates life, or if life imitates Worry. The realest part of this novel, though, is the relationship between two siblings, and from the opening scenes, I saw the complex, messy, and often hilarious experience of sisterhood reflected back at me. If you have a sister, this book is for you, and if you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to have a sister, this is quite a revealing portrait.”
—Emily P., Assistant Editor, on Worry
Product Details
- Publisher: Scribner (March 26, 2024)
- Length: 304 pages
- ISBN13: 9781668018613
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Raves and Reviews
"A bitingly funny, extremely online novel about sisterhood." —Washington Post, Summer Reading Recommendations
“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's "Best Vacation Read"
"A moody beach read for girls who hate their jobs, text their exes, and feel like the things they want will destroy them." —Kelsey McKinney, host of Normal Gossip
"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
"Jewish anxiety is perfectly distilled in this quick read. . . . the humor and singularity of voice make it an excellent pool-side read." —Kveller
"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
“Tanner’s Brooklyn-set debut novel about two sisters’ coming-of-anxiety is both riotously funny and wryly existential.” —Harper's Bazaar
"There’s warmth and originality at play here, as well as a strong emotional undertow to Tanner’s tale of anti-vax momfluencers and the indignity of splitting the cheque at birthday parties held at expensive small-plates restaurants. . . . Jen Beagin's zany and brilliant Big Swiss could be this book’s cousin." —The Guardian
"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
"As vividly and unrelentingly dark as the world of Worry is, its storytelling style is genuinely funny; Tanner also inserts absurd details and scenarios that will make you laugh despite the narrator’s sour perspective." —The Cut
"A portrait of contemporary life that is equal parts hilarious, brutal, and affecting." —Lilith
"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. . . . 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." —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
"Intense . . . engrossing . . . hilarious." —Style Weekly
“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
"Candid, funny." —BBC, Best Novels of 2024 (So Far)
"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
"A ‘Seinfeldian’ take on sibling rivalry . . . hilarious, moving and reflective." —WPR
"Worry is a wonder. A novel you could spend all day in, mesmerised by the unexpected leaps and jumps of its sentences. It is at once gorgeous, hilarious, disturbing, and very, very sad. If you have a sister, are a sister, or wish you had a sister, read Worry." —Jenny Mustard, author of Okay Days
"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
Resources and Downloads
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- Book Cover Image (jpg): Worry Hardcover 9781668018613
- Author Photo (jpg): Alexandra Tanner Photograph © Sasha Fletcher(0.1 MB)
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