Worry is the kind of story that comes along only every so often, one that reminds me why I love fiction and why I ever started writing it. It does what all good storytelling should do: remind you that you’re alive. That seems like a trite and oversimplified thing to say, but to give language to feelings that you didn’t even know were there, to kick you out of cruise control and remind you that you’re the one steering your life along is a good, rare thing—especially when our phones make giving up that control so easy and appealing. I asked Tanner about the role social media plays in the story and how this novel came together.

Aaron Schwartz: Social media—particularly the world of Mormon influencers on Instagram—plays a big role in this novel as this parasocial obsession for Jules. What was it about that niche that drew you to write about it?

Alexandra Tanner: When we’re in a lonely or bizarre stretch of life, social media can take on this enormous power over us—I wanted to have, in Jules, a character who was already really in the throes of a social media addiction that’s the result of an intense struggle with a whole set of anxieties. I wanted the rhythms of her consumption to mirror her inner emotional life, rising or falling depending on how her inner world felt at any given moment.

I was personally obsessed with mommy bloggers for a while, starting in late 2019 and kind of hitting a peak in the middle of 2020. There was something so uncanny about the way they described themselves, their families, their personal and political beliefs; the way so many of them were selling something; the way huge questions of transparency and identity and culture and artifice were all intersecting there, despite how dumb it all was at the end of the day. Their compulsions to post about everything—from wild conspiracy theories to very private, intimate details about their lives—seemed like they were running parallel to my own compulsion to numb out and consume other people’s lives instead of paying attention to my own. But I felt this kind of evil superiority to them that said a lot about the place I was in at that time emotionally, intellectually, in terms of maturity. I wanted to use Jules to make a portrait of the huge and inexplicable existential crisis the mommies had created in my own life.

AS: Worry takes place from the beginning to the end of 2019. Without giving too much away, Jules and her sister Poppy are living together in tight quarters and regularly bumping heads. On top of that, there are the conspiracy theories, misinformation, and bigotry Jules can’t seem to get away from on the internet. Listening to this novel in a post-pandemic world, I couldn’t help but see the writing on the wall of what’s to come for them in 2020 and beyond. How important for you was it to set this story at that time in regard to Jules and Poppy’s dynamic and the landscape of social media?

AT: I started writing the book in mid-2019, and what I remember about that year is that it felt really normal until all of a sudden it didn’t. I remember spending more and more time on my phone looking at the weird tenor of what people were posting and how much more frequently they seemed to be posting, and wanting to write a book that would capture what I felt was this magnetic pull away from real life. My parents’ dog died a horrible slow death; I visited a survivalist supply store that had opened in the middle of this cute little town where my parents vacation; everyone started talking about COVID; I was text-banking for Bernie Sanders, because there was this desperate deranged collective hope that he would save everyone from college debt, or something, and just getting these deranged responses from people who were so furious, who were just texting horrible things back into the void, not realizing a real person was reading these messages, about wanting to kill, wanting civil war, wanting the mass death of Jews, wanting mass death in general.

And as I kept writing, into 2020 and 2021, the world kind of fell off this cliff, and whatever normalcy or illusion of normalcy we’d all been clinging to was just out the window. 2019 was the last year I cared about politics, the last time I remember feeling really shocked by the things I’d see on the internet, the last chapter of what it felt like the trajectory my life—all our lives—had been following. It’s probably a little anachronistic to look back on that year and say it really seemed like shit was about to hit the fan, that there was this slow boiling-over of our society and our relationships and our way of communicating, but that’s what I see when I look back—I wanted Poppy and Jules’s relationship to have a restlessness and antagonism and sense of pressure to it that mirrored what the world felt like then.

AS: There are so many great moments in the novel where Jules is trying to reckon with the overwhelming ennui she’s experiencing and feeling weighed down by—in part brought on by her Mormon “mommies” on Instagram and the anxiety of being in her late twenties. It’s hard to fight an enemy that doesn’t have a name, so from a craft perspective, how did you approach writing a character grappling with something she can’t seem to really pin down herself?

AT: I wanted this book to feel like real life—and I think in real life, when we’re in the midst of an existential crisis or a big personal change, we can’t really see it; it just feels like everything is wrong. So I set out, in the writing, to make everything in Jules’s life feel wrong. Writing in first-person, and especially writing in the present tense—which I think can be grating in the same way anxiety and intrusive thoughts are grating—let me editorialize these really banal interactions from Jules’s point of view and kind of turn everything into an extreme. I think in that way she’s an unreliable narrator—she’s reporting a degree of truth, but her own mind is such a prison that there’s this outsized insanity to so much of what she experiences. I love that scene in Wet Hot American Summer where Paul Rudd’s character has to put, like, one plate away, and he’s huffing and schlumping all over the place, drawing it out, like every second is this unbearable effort. That’s Jules—to her, life is against her, even though of course it’s just life.