WORRY, by Alexandra Tanner
In a much-memed scene from the second season of “Fleabag,” the protagonist is in the middle of confession with her hot priest crush and divulges a flash of what feels like genuine, abject self-discovery. “I just think I want someone to tell me how to live my life,” she says. Now picture the Father is replaced by a Mother (or, better yet, a Mommy), the confessional by a cellphone screen in a Brooklyn apartment, the 30-something British antihero by a 20-something Jewish American woman, and you can begin to imagine the essence of Alexandra Tanner’s fabulously revealing debut novel, “Worry.”
Jules is a 28-year-old aspiring writer from Florida with an M.F.A. in fiction and a day job at a website that sells study guides of classic novels. In claustrophobic present tense she candidly narrates the minutiae of her fixations, disappointments, aversions and maladjustments as she navigates adulthood.
At the risk of being too schematic, Jules’s interests, beyond her efforts to achieve literary renown, can be boiled down to consuming “Christian Mommy” social media content and critiquing her sister, Poppy. The former is symptomatic of a larger personal complex — though Jules wants to be independent, she craves a matriarchal authority’s approval, guidance and comfort, perhaps because her own mother can be rejecting and inscrutable. In its more superficial manifestation, Jules’s curiosity consists of scrolling the internet for hours each day, watching Instagram moms share conspiracy theories in all-caps and hawk products.
Poppy, younger than Jules by a few years, is following in her sister’s footsteps. Having just emerged from a rocky early 20s, marked by short-lived professional prospects and mental health crises, she moves into Jules’s spare room, begins working jobs similar to her sister’s and also starts an entertainment binge, watching episodes of “Sailor Moon” with Jules. Poppy suffers from chronic outbreaks of hives. Like Jules, she is often overwhelmed and fearful of the world, although compared with her sister she seems more secure in her own mind, if not in her own skin. In a moment of self-love, Poppy adopts a three-legged dog named Amy Klobuchar.
