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Alexandra Tanner is a writer and editor who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. Her work appears in the New York Times Book Review, the Baffler, Jewish Currents, and Joyland, among other outlets. Worry (Scribner, March 26, 2024) is her first novel.
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
Worry is about two sisters in their 20s battling mental illness, existential inertia, and each other. It reads as absurdist, but it's drawn from life.
On your nightstand now:
Brecht on Theatre, Pilar Quintana's The Bitch, Percival Everett's Erasure, and Richard McGuire's Here, a mostly wordless graphic novel that I've read several times but love to get lost in before bed.
Favorite book when you were a child:
I loved all the Avibooks, and Jacob Have I Loved was big for me, too. So was The Rainbow Fish. This question is blowing my mind, because I haven't thought about these books in years, and now I'm like, my first novel is about sisters who can't stand each other, and one of them is named Poppy, and she moves to the big city in search of adventure, and she keeps giving away all these pieces of herself.
Your top five authors:
Joy Williams, Garielle Lutz, Rebecca Curtis, Nick Drnaso, Ottessa Moshfegh.
Book you've faked reading:
Unfortunately, I run into this problem quite a lot, because I can be really bad about reading all the way through. Elisa Gabbert has written about this, how sometimes you don't need to finish a book to get something major from it, or how you can find yourself halfway through something that you suddenly realize you're not ready for or in need of. So I try to never lie about having read something--but sometimes I can really only half-participate in a conversation about it.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Lately I've been recommending Gitta Sereny's Into That Darkness, which I read last year: a heavy book of rare moral complexity.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Johanna Hedva's Your Love Is Not Good is the last book whose cover pulled me in hard to the work.
Book you hid from your parents:
The Horse Whisperer when I was 10 or 11. I thought it was going to be about horses, but it was more about sex.
Book that changed your life:
Sarah Ruhl's The Clean House, her book of collected plays. It was what made me want to write when I first read it in high school: pain and whimsy so close together; stage directions that felt like poetry; characters who spoke their hearts to each other without ever overexpressing themselves. I studied playwriting for nearly a decade trying to become Sarah Ruhl, and then I became myself. There's a whole section in Worry that turns her version of Eurydice into an emotional reference point when the narrator, Jules, can't express herself on her own.
Favorite line from a book:
The one that comes immediately to mind is the last line of My Brilliant Friend: "It was the pair she had made with Rino, making and unmaking them for months, ruining her hands."
Five books you'll never part with:
Where Have You Been? (childhood comfort), The Incest Diary (now-favorite), Annie John (exquisite pearl), A Wizard of Earthsea (necessary spiritual lessons), The Secret History (no book is more fun to re-read, especially once you've heard her do the audiobook).
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
I wish I could read my partner Sasha Fletcher's first novel, Be Here to Love Me at the End of the World, with totally fresh eyes. I've read it in so many different forms and stages over the last several years, and I wish I could wipe it from my brain and then come to it with complete surprise.
Books you can't wait to read this year:
Kiley Reid's Come and Get It, Mariah Stovall's I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both, Vinson Cunningham's Great Expectations, Rita Bullwinkel's Headshot, August Thompson's Anyone's Ghost. Plus Elspeth Barker's O Caledonia, David Markson's This Is Not a Novel, and a long-overdue re-read of Marie Calloway's what purpose did i serve in your life.