Mary Laura Philpott (Penguins with People Problems; I Miss You When I Blink) is worried. According to her amusingly fretful essay collection Bomb Shelter: Love, Time, and Other Explosives, she's worried about her children's health, her aging parents' health, her own health, climate change, school shootings, the imminent empty nest, losing her looks, not being taken seriously and the turtle who lives in her Nashville neighborhood. Other than the turtle bit, these are fairly standard anxiety arenas, but Philpott has a leg up in the Handwringers' Olympics even beyond her snappy sentences, disarming self-awareness and winning self-deprecation.
When he was in 10th grade, Philpott's son had an epileptic seizure on the bathroom floor. Philpott greeted this harrowing sight with a "sense of recognition": "Oh. There it is... the worry had finally materialized." Call it an affirmation of a life spent wearing "disaster-colored glasses." Philpott's son's newfound vulnerability is a recurring touch point throughout Bomb Shelter, whose essays explore worry-churning developments, both immediate (Philpott's father's triple bypass) and ongoing (Philpott has a cache--"my secret showcase of gullibility"--of pricey anti-aging skin creams). Throughout her book, whose occasional lapses into mawkishness are soon enough undercut by humor, Philpott makes a persuasive case for the worrywart.
Readers of Bomb Shelter will see, and they may well join Philpott as, felled by worrisome herniated discs, she lies on the floor and stares at the ceiling, working through her anxieties, a supine but proud poster child for nervous Nellies everywhere. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer