“Worry” by Alexandra Tanner

theSkimm

Alert: A genuinely funny book has entered the chat. Jules is 28. She has an MFA in fiction, an apartment in Brooklyn, and a disappointing day job. Then her younger sister, Poppy, comes to live with her, and things get marginally more interesting (Poppy adopts a dog named Amy Klobuchar, for one). This debut novel’s observations about life in 2019 — and in your twenties — are darkly hilarious and almost too spot on. We asked Alexandra Tanner a few questions. Here’s what she had to say…

Q: Just like Jules, your younger sibling also lived with you. How did your experience compare to that of Jules and Poppy?

Tanner: My sibling came to crash in my 200-square-foot West Village studio for five months back in 2016 — it was beautiful and unbearable. I had a daybed with a trundle underneath and that was how we slept every night, basically on top of each other. The refrigerator door was broken, and we’d both have to lift it off and then haul it back on, together, anytime we wanted to get something out. I was working retail, they were working at a news network. We ate pasta like four nights a week. We were stepping all over each other’s lives literally and metaphorically — but when we look back on it now, we look back with real tenderness.

Q: What are a few things that, without a doubt, got you through the process of writing “Worry”?

Tanner: The music of Ornette Coleman and Ichiko Aoba, this candle, and getting some good moody lighting in my office.

Q: If you had to trade places with a real or fictional sibling for six months, who would you choose and why?

Tanner: Elizabeth Olsen, so that I could get a bunch of free sh*t from The Row.

Q: What’s the best book you’ve read recently?

Tanner: I found myself unbelievably moved and thrilled by Marie-Helene Bertino’s newest novel, “Beautyland” … [which is] about a girl named Adina who’s born in Philadelphia in the 1970s and grows up believing that she’s an alien who’s been sent to Earth to report on humanity, the conditions of planet Earth, and whether it might make a good home for her people … I heard [Bertino] say in an interview that she wrote with the goal of making the familiar feel strange and mystifying, and she does it with such warmth and humor.