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<h1>Best Summary and Analysis: Worry by Alexandra Tanner List of Characters and Major Themes Analysis and Study Guide</h1>
<em>Worry (2024) by Alexandra Tanner reviewed</em>

<p>In college, my friend recorded an unreleased podcast episode where I discussed
my approach to writing fiction. My mind had been corrupted by the popularity of
autofiction in the 2010s and I said something like, the point of my writing is to
capture life as directly and accurately as possible, without embellishments. Life has no
narrative arc or structure, no transcendent purpose, and to write should be an exercise in refining our experience of
our own real lives. We should write to reflect upon and understand our direct
relationship with the world as it actually is.</p>

<p>When I graduated college, I truly wanted to be a writer, but writing seemed like
this fantastical career out of reach of my talents, connections, and financial
means.  In terms of my actual writing "career," I did some poetry, had a
few publications in small-to-mid-sized indie magazines, moved to Chicago, had a
chapbook published, did more readings, but eventually more or less stopped
writing. Instead I ended up doing my non-writer plan B career, where I spent
eight years getting a shitty tech job, then a slightly less shitty tech job,
then a good tech job.  It's only earlier this year that I started writing
again, on this extremely unread blog (which I increasingly love).</p>

<p>It was during my college years that I met Shy Watson, through Twitter, 
and invited her to a reading at a yearly arts festival (which has a
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Thumb_Gallery">Wikipedia article</a>
despite being flagged for for years for not even remotely clearing the notability guidelines).
We remained friends &mdash; she lived in Chicago briefly
at the same time as me, I did a reading with her for my chapbook once in Brooklyn, etc. Shy was in
New York last month and invited me to a reading, only the second I'd been to in
the last five years, where I briefly met Alexandra Tanner, who was also reading, and I loved
her short story, then later discovered she was about to release a book,
got a copy, read it, and thoroughly enjoyed it.</p>

<p><em>Worry</em> is very funny and feels shockingly contemporary (references
	to TikTok threw me off a little). It is a novel about family,
precarious and alienating office work, living in a city, dating in
a city, and worrying. It is especially about examining a particular form of
modern alienation and subjectivity that comes from living in a world whose
emotional legibility is constantly and maddenlingly absurd. It is a novel in which, according to a one-star Goodreads review,
"there is no plot," "nothing happens," and "not a single character [is]
remotely likeable." In other words, my favorite kind of writing.</p>

<p>This is, of course, a common criticism of a certain kind of story,
and I sometimes wonder what people mean when they say "nothing happens." Obviously, a lot
happens in <em>Worry</em>. The book covers a year(ish?) of time where Jules Gold lives with
her sister, gets in fights with her mother, hooks up with her ex-boyfriend,
loses her job, gets in fights with her sister, scrolls Instagram, gets a dog, gets a new
job, goes to thanksgiving, doesn't go to a high school reunion, and so on. But these events, which bear a resemblance to the normal experience of many of our lives, often overlooked by narrative fiction, evidently don't count
as "things happening."</p>

<p><em>Worry</em> is also a novel about the internet. In the words of The Washington Post, it is an <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/04/18/worry-alexandra-tanner-review/">extremely online</a> novel. Its style reminded me of Jenny Odell's brief description of what it's like to read
Twitter in her 2019 essay <a
href="https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/04/19/why-does-this-feel-so-bad/">Why
Does this Feel So Bad?</a></p>

<blockquote>
For example, let’s take a look at my Twitter feed right now. I see the following:

<ul>
	<li> An article on Al Jazeera by a woman whose cousin was killed at school by ISIL</li>
	<li>An article about the Rohingya Muslims fleeing Myanmar last year</li>
	<li> An announcement that @dasharez0ne (a joke account) is selling new T-shirts</li>
	<li> Someone wishing happy birthday to former NASA worker Katherine Johnson</li>
	<li> A video of NBC announcing the death of Senator McCain and shortly afterward cutting to people dressed as dolphins appearing to masturbate onstage</li>
	<li> Photos of Yogi Bear mascot statues dumped in a forest</li>
	<li>A job alert for director of the landscape architecture program at Morgan State University</li>
	<li>A photo of a yet another fire erupting, this time in the Santa Ana Mountains</li>
	<li>Someone’s data visualization of his daughter’s sleeping habits during her first year</li>
	<li>A plug for someone’s upcoming book about the anarchist scene in Chicago</li>
	<li> An Apple ad for Music Lab, starring Florence Welch</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>

<p>Put so matter-of-factly, the experience of reading Twitter sounds completely
insane, deeply unsettling. How could one possibly process this information in
an emotionally legible way? By 2019 (the year <em>Worry</em> takes place), this
"Twitter-style" context-free rapid-fire arrangement of information had
become not just a common outlook, but also the
character of the world itself. When cities and political institutions
are marked by a rootless nihilism, how can we possibly properly bear
witness to suffering? From where can we draw our moral force?</p>

<p>This free associative set of images is <em>Worry</em>'s emotional arc &mdash; the difficulty of developing a normal or healthy
consciousness in a world that is increasingly insane. The book's narrative
style captures this incongruity: serious, horrifying things happen after or between absurd,
funny, alienating things, all in quick succession. Characters have absolutely
bizarre and inscrutable responses to terrifying and serious events (the scene
where Jules's high school friend talks about her stillborn child is one of the
more shocking), and the reader and narrator is left overwhelmed and bewildered.</p>

<p><em>Worry</em> offers little escape from this mode of experience &mdash; but
rather a clear (and frequently hilarious) description of it. Jules feels
trapped: in her relationships, in her
life, in her living situation with her sister who she simultaneously loves and feels suffocated by, and is vaguely searching for some escape but cannot find it. Her primary
strategy is to scroll social media, in search of some thing which will vaguely
shake her out of "it" and fix her life. This is a feeling I relate to. I find
myself ocassionally hopelessly addicted to my phone. Something like, I want a
life full of great and interesting experiences, and the overwhelming feeling 
of social media is a sort of substitution. It's not exactly pleasant, but, in Jules's description of her obsession with Mormon mommy bloggers, feels like "research" for some undetermined purpose. Even near the end of the novel, when
the mild irritation of the rest of the book is replaced with genuine trauma,
Jules's response is to scroll Instagram (but more intensely than any time before), a
particularly contemporary form of emotional dysregulation.
</p>

<p>In an <a href="https://lithub.com/alexandra-tanner-on-vulnerability-making-money-as-a-writer-and-taking-literary-shortcuts/">interview</a> with Literary Hub, Tanner says:
<blockquote>My dream novel is just reading about the boring minutiae of someone’s days
over and over and over. I would read a thousand pages of just someone doing the
same thing and having this slow, almost so slow it’s unnoticeable change or
struggle. Maybe I’ll write something like that one day, but <em>Worry</em> wasn’t the
book for it.</blockquote>

<p>
This answer reminded me of Megan Boyle's <em>Liveblog</em>, or maybe Lucy Ellman's
<em>Ducks, Newburyport</em>. I would like to see Tanner write a similarly ambitious anti-narrative ultra-realist encyclopedic
novel in this vein. The world is a very strange place, and a contemporary realist novel like <em>Worry</em> maybe helps us understand what it is actually like, helps us organize and contextualize our experiences. This kind of writing is maybe, even, increasingly essential.
</p>

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