Commiserating about mom or fighting like cats, these sisters have one thing in common: ‘Worry’

Within the first few pages of Alexandra Tanner’s dark, funny debut, sisters Poppy and Jules exhibit their capacity to indulge in the titular word.

As a verb, it is among their central activities: They interrogate the source of Poppy’s hives, the cleanliness of a restaurant, their parents’ willingness to subsidize their lives in New York. Poppy, a recent arrival to the city and the survivor of a suicide attempt, shoplifts and complains, while Jules, the narrator, scrolls on social media and grapples with surges of (mostly health-related) anxiety. Their mother, Wendy, in Florida, appears mostly by way of text, criticizing their shoes or making the following pronouncement: “You just bring out the worst in each other.”

The novel explores this acerbic assessment. Within hours of Poppy’s arrival, the sisters fight on either side of a closed door; the chapter closes as Poppy hurls a broken fingernail at Jules. Tanner neither fully ridicules nor absolves this aimless, fretful pair. It turns out, for instance, that their shared apartment is a former hospital; “the basement,” Jules heard, “was once the morgue.”

In such a setting, frequent contemplation of illness and death feels justified. When Jules recoils from a pet-adoption website, she tells Poppy, “‘I hate ‘paw-rents.’ I hate being a millennial, being targeted like this.”

It’s an amusing line, with both foreshadowing and an undercurrent of real sorrow; that sorrow grows exponentially when Jules alludes to “the mass shooting that took place a year ago at the high school five minutes from the house where Poppy and I grew up.” Incrementally, Tanner layers the sisters’ habitual distraction — Jules’ following of social media “mommies,” Poppy’s romance novels — with the reasons they need distraction in the first place.

Those reasons are real, raw and deeply frightening. The comfort the sisters receive is complicated or fleeting — Jules’ father sends affectionate messages. He also provides cosmetic procedures, so that Jules is both daughter and patient. Wendy’s messages are often antagonistic and cold, as if she is posting them anonymously.

The family’s Thanksgiving is unsurprisingly catastrophic. Tanner captures with great accuracy the way fragmented communication can exacerbate the very problem two people — Poppy and Jules, or Jules and Wendy — are trying to navigate. Jules is most comfortable scrolling on her phone, rather than engaging with the people around her.

“I just wanted an excuse to feel like the way I looked at the internet was different than the way everyone else looked at the internet; like the way I wasted my time was special,” she thinks.

Tanner’s title can be read numerous ways, as different parts of speech. At times, it carries the tone of a suggestion.

Families can find mental health information and resources for crisis care on NAMI Minnesota’s website, namimn.org. If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts, call the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988. You can also text HOME to 741741 to connect with a Crisis Text Line counselor.

Jackie Thomas-Kennedy, whose writing has appeared in the Washington Post, American Short Fiction and One Story, is a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

Worry

By: Alexandra Tanner.

Publisher: Scribner, 291 pages, $27.