What is Worry about?

Worry is about two sisters in their twenties, Jules and Poppy, who spend a deranged year living together in Brooklyn for the first time since childhood. It begins in 2019, and Poppy’s been living at home in Florida for a few years, dealing with chronic hives and depression and parents who make her feel like an embarrassment; Jules is fresh off a big breakup, working at a job she hates, and she wants to be around someone who’s doing worse than she is, so she lets Poppy come stay in her spare bedroom and try to get herself on-track. They become intruders in each other’s lives: confronting how different they’ve become, trying to re-meet one another, struggling to find compassion for each other. At the same time, they’re getting into sloppy fights at Target, doing too many drugs, stealing each other’s clothes and jobs and privacy, having huge ego death meltdowns. It’s a slice-of-life story about two people trying to care for each other, and wrecking each other, and learning almost nothing in the process. And then at the end being like: “We made it. Time to crush 2020.” 

Talk a little bit about Jules and Poppy—who are they, and what do they mean to each other? How are their views of sisterhood and its responsibilities different?

Poppy’s very sensitive, very earnest; I feel like she loves Hamilton. But she also really wants to die. She has this massive anger. Jules is neurotically self-absorbed, but deeply observant—she’s not very intellectual at all, but I think she has this image of herself as like: a girl who’s too smart for her own good. Poppy has intense convictions about community and family and the work of “emotional labor,” but they’re a little performative. And Jules is way more barbed—she’s only looking out for herself a lot of the time, and she doesn’t have the energy to pretend otherwise. I think there’s a real sense of care between them, but there’s also this more narcissistic awareness of being each other’s mirrors: they project themselves onto one another, which I think is unavoidable between sisters. 

What made you want to write a novel about sisterhood?

In 2016, my younger sibling and I lived together for six months in a 200-square-foot studio—they were in New York for an internship and the apartment they were supposed to stay in was full of mold, and they were breaking out in hives, so they came to sleep on my floor. The living space was so narrow that I had a daybed with a trundle instead of a bed-bed. We slept literally on top of each other. We fought every day. Physically. A nightmare. A few years ago, though, I realized I was looking back on our living together with real fondness, and I called my sibling and I was like: “I think I want to write about this—remember how fun it was?” And they were like: “That was the worst time of my fucking life. But I loved how often we ate at Buvette.” Feeling tender and wistful about the most miserable things you’ve been through together—that’s siblinghood, to me.  

Did writing Worry teach you anything about being a sister?

The book draws so much on the dynamic I have with my younger sibling, and while Jules and Poppy are ultimately pretty different from us, it was so emotional to put the broader contours of our relationship on the page, to re-encounter us in that way. It made me feel more protective of what we have, more grateful for the experience of being known so completely by someone. I’ve revised my understanding of what it is to be a sister over the last few years in all these different ways, and it feels like a much more expansive role to me now. Sisters are often pressured to relate to each other in terms of this shared experience of gender, to have that be the focal point of the relationship, and that can feel so limiting and infuriating. When I look at the book now, I see echoes of that driving Jules and Poppy. There’s something really feral and instinctual about how they are with each other, almost like they’re very small children. Writing Worry taught me a lot about how to carry a sibling relationship beyond the structures of family and gender and distance, and about what it is to give siblinghood the space it deserves in your life.  

Jules and Poppy are Jewish, but they have a complicated relationship to religion—how did Judaism, and other Jewish stories, shape the novel’s tone and outlook? What did it mean to you to write a Jewish book?

To me, the big questions in Judaism really parallel some of the big questions in writing, especially when you’re writing from life: What are our responsibilities to our families and our communities? What are our responsibilities to our traditions, especially ones that maybe don’t work so well for us anymore; to memories of the past, and memories of suffering? It takes the fullness of a lifetime, and a lot of mistakes, to arrive anywhere with questions that large. I wanted Worry to reflect that, the way my favorite contemporary Jewish stories do—whether it’s something like Uncut Gems that captures that freneticism of feeling trapped between tradition and ambition, or Lexi Freiman’s Inappropriation, which was a huge touchpoint in terms of developing a sense of humor when it comes to feeling othered and insufficient and somehow behind everyone else; feeling uncertain about or annoyed with what it means to be a Jew. I wanted Worry to take on the bleakness and absurdity of it all.  

How did Jules’s internet mommies become such a huge part of the novel?

I knew I wanted to write something where I could transcribe the internet really closely, where I could explore what was so maddening and inane about “content.” I’d been following a ton of mommy bloggers, because I thought they were fun to look at, but as we got deeper into 2019 and into 2020, the lid kind of blew off and suddenly all these things converged on their corner of the internet: QAnon stuff, Freudian stuff, white nationalist stuff, performance-of-self stuff, MLM girlboss stuff. The mommies were my gateway to hell. It felt like they might make Jules even more insane and furious than they made me, so they became her way in, too.  

Poppy struggles with depression and mysterious hives, Jules is a hypochondriac with an emergent eating disorder, their dog Amy Klobuchar has lost a leg—how do illnesses, disabilities, and disorders shape the world of the book?

I think when you’re living with any kind of illness—or when someone you love is—there’s this desire to attach a certain kind of arc or a narrative to it: this is happening for a reason, this will teach me something about myself, this will make me stronger. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” or whatever. But there’s already so much, societally speaking, telling us that illness and disability is something we invent or bring upon ourselves or should be more capable of buckling up and riding out, and I think the need to give illness a structure comes in part from the shame of that. Worry explores the compulsion to make suffering feel instructive, useful, or fortifying, and shows how damaging it can be.  

I’m starting to understand why you titled your debut novel Worry. Can you talk a little more about your inspiration?

Maybe nine or ten months into writing the book, I saw someone tweet about this tertiary, more archaic definition of “worry” as a verb—“to slay, kill or injure by biting and shaking the throat (as a dog or wolf does).” I thought immediately about Jules and Poppy’s rescue dog Amy Klobuchar, and about her bad bad behavior. Seeing the word in that new context, it became this prismatic thing where it worked on every level: there was this new, feral dimension; there was the metaphor for Jules and Poppy’s relationship, how “worrying” something is this repetitious act of trying to smooth something over, but ultimately messing with it so much that you wear it down; and of course there was the anxiety angle, that Seinfeldian sense of all these irritating ruminations and interactions becoming more and more intolerable. As a title, it just captured everything. And over the years I’ve been sitting with it, it’s kind of started to feel like an imperative, too; the world’s coming apart, and it’s like: the president’s getting Juvederm? We should be worried.