I Tether Myself to You: A Conversation with Alexandra Tanner

By Yasmin Roshanian

Alexandra Tanner’s debut novel Worry (Scribner, March 2024) follows sisters Jules and Poppy as they contend with the turbulence of their twenties in New York. Tanner presents a poignantly tender and deeply funny portrait of sisterhood, millennial angst, and what it means to find a tether in the world. 

Jules slowly unravels. She is largely unsatisfied with her life, feeling stagnant in her writing and her relationships, and grappling with her sense of self. Then Poppy moves in. She’s a thread of loose ends, too. Together the sisters search for meaning and reel in a volatile intimacy. 

Alexandra Tanner is a writer and editor. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Granta, LARB, The New York Times Book Review, The Baffler, The End, Forever Mag, and Jewish Currents. She holds an MFA from The New School and is a recipient of grants and fellowships from MacDowell, The Center for Fiction, and The Spruceton Inn’s Artist Residency. She lives in Brooklyn. 

I had the immense joy of speaking with Tanner in early February. We discussed sisterhood, Jewish identity, comedic timing, and more. 

Yasmin Roshanian: I’m so intrigued by the intricacies of sisterhood portrayed here. Jules and Poppy have a complex dynamic—what exists between them is a need for complete transparency, but also complete concealment. Did you always know you wanted to write a novel about sisters? Why was the terrain of sisterhood appealing to you? 

Alexandra Tanner: I love this question. I love talking and thinking about sisterhood. I have a younger sibling, and they’re my favorite person in the world. We’re very close, and we lived together for several months in 2016. A few years later, I wanted to write a kind of social or domestic novel, and that experience of intruding on each other’s lives felt like a really interesting place to anchor a story. What you’re talking about in terms of total transparency and total concealment—that dynamic really motivated the psychology of the book. When you have a sibling, you can have a relationship with almost no boundaries. You can say anything to me; I can say anything to you, and because we’re bound by all of these things—the structure of our family, the understanding we have of one another’s issues, the love we have for each other; we’re always going to be connected. At the same time, it’s a delusion to think that you know a person so entirely because you grew up together—because you have the same parents; because you were raised in the same way. Every person has secrets. Everyone has a complete internal world that you know nothing about. There’s the notion that Jules and Poppy know everything about each other, and they can say anything to each other, but at the end of the day, there is still this gulf between them. I wanted to tease that out, and see if I could bring them together, and apart; and together, and apart. I wanted to play with stakes.

YR: Connected to this is the theme of motherhood, and what it means to be taken care of; or to care for. The dynamic between Poppy, Jules, and their mother is a polarizing one too,  one of shifting alliances and conditional love. How did you think about the familial unit and the differences between sisters and mother and daughters in the writing? 

AT: I’m really interested in family dynamics. Family is a big part of my life—I think people can gauge that from reading the book. I’m very close with my own family, and I love them very deeply, but family is volatile for me too, and there’s an element of feeling like you are your truest self around them, but at the same time your most primitive, childlike self, and it can be so hard to get to that place of harmony with each other. When you’re an older sister, as Jules is—a younger sister can look to you for instructions in how to be: “This is how we put eyeshadow on, or this is how we behave in these situations.” The model for the older sister, though, is the mother, who is obviously light-years ahead in terms of life experience. I think this creates a lot of uncertainty, too. Who am I looking to? Where am I finding safety? Jules and Poppy want to radically reparent each other, and I think siblings often think that they can do that. I don’t know if it’s successful--they’re both just chasing their tails a little bit. Ultimately, I think that’s what caring for their dog Amy Klobuchar does. They want to come together to take care of something, but they sort of wind up making her a victim of their desperation to be fully formed people; to prove they can do that kind of caretaking.

YR: I want to talk about the search for meaning. Both sisters struggle significantly with their mental health in different forms, and Jules tries—and seemingly fails—to find an anchor in the world. We see her submerge herself in the internet, collecting memes and influencers with purpose, and finding that they feed the emptiness within her. She also attempts to trace her lineage, finding a point of connection to Judaism and to her ancestry. We see her attempts to find a tether in her platonic, familial, and romantic relationships. What is it that Jules is ultimately looking for? What is she trying to claim, or reconcile with?

AT: I think of this novel as an existentialist novel. Not in any pretentious, philosophical sense, but in the sense that it is really, really hard to know who you are right now. There’s complete information saturation and bombardment. I think about the early aughts and mid-2000s—the way that a vision of what life was was advertised to us on television was bad for us. And now, that’s every moment of life. We’re constantly being told, “You could have more money; you could have more love in your life; you could have more success.” 

YR: Jules is just a really rootless person. She hasn’t figured out who she is, or what she wants. I think some of that comes from living for her family, and trying to slot herself this idea of what success as a writer or a girlfriend could look like. She’s not really thinking, “What do I want? Who am I?”

AT: In my own family, I have a lot of questions about distant relatives, or ancestors. I have this sense that if I could know more about what a specific relative looked like, for instance, or where they came from; or what was important to them, then I could figure out what’s supposed to be important to me, where the parts of me come from. Jules and Poppy could find a deeper connection with each other, but I think that would require more of them than they’re willing to give.

YR: I also want to explore Jules and Poppy’s complex relationship to Judaism. There are so many facets to faith and identity. I was hoping you could share what it means for them to hold a Jewish identity. 

AT: My Jewish identity is something that continues evolving throughout my life. I grew up in an interfaith household in South Florida feeling like I wasn’t very Jewish—I didn’t have a Bat Mitzvah; I didn’t have any religious training. Then when I went to college, I was meeting people who had never met a Jewish person, and I started to recognize how much a part of me Jewish culture really was. I think identity evolves in that way when you’re in relief against whatever new point of your life you're at. To me, Judaism is a lens through which I see the world. It’s about questioning ritual. It’s about questioning tradition; questioning what it is to be good to another person; what it is to hold the weight of pain to a certain point, and then do something with that pain. I’m not a religious person, or active in religion in any sense, but I just think in terms of these questions: How do we make life bearable for each other? How do we use humor? How do we use family? I wanted all of that to be activated in the novel; to have Jules and Poppy wrestling with the same questions that I am; seeing the world through this particular lens.

YR: The novel is a deep dive into Instagram captions, relationships sustained through the constant exchanging of memes, and the authenticity (or lack thereof) that we can find on the internet. How does the digital landscape work here? 

AT: I think we’re the last generation to be bamboozled by this effect. We’re the last generation to recall that there was a before, and now there's an after. I spend so much time on my phone, and so much time emailing, and so much time looking at social media. And not even social media of people I care about, but people I don’t know, and will never know. 

I’m fascinated in my own life by how revealing digital communication is; how the minutiae of how people choose to express themselves online can show you so much about who someone wants to be or how they see themselves. That’s why I wanted the novel to be really internet-heavy. Jules for sure uses the internet to kind of numb out from her life; to make time pass. What’s ironic is that throughout the book, we see that when she’s using the internet, she’s so present with it; so keyed into what every piece of punctuation and turn of phrase that the people she’s following use. Jules is sort of pulling us down into the netherworld of the internet with her, forcing us to spend time looking at the world through the prism of what she sees on there.

YR: I want to talk about your prose and your comedic timing. Your dialogue is so sharp. You manage to write these beautifully tender moments against moments that are funny, balancing poignancy with humor. The rhythm here works so well. What was your process, and what were you reading as you wrote? What were some early influences?

AT: I trained as a playwright for a few years in college, and my first year of graduate school was in playwriting, so the dialogue has always been really important to me. I think that’s the hardest thing to get right, and it's the thing I always want to get right—how people talk to each other, and capturing the rhythms of what communication really sounds like; how broken it often is. In writing Worry, I wanted to write something that would be personal, and exacting, and would really just accomplish the goal of making my younger sibling laugh when they looked at my sort of transcript of this experience we shared of living together. And I found that when you write really specifically; by imagining specific people and their specific cadences and points of view, the material opens up and becomes universal. 

As far as influences, and what I was reading, I started this in 2019, so it’s hard to remember what I was specifically reading at the time. I was just getting super into fiction written from life, so Sheila Heti was really big for me, and Sally Rooney was really big for me. I just reread Conversations with Friends this week. I needed comfort, and I needed something that was going to make me happy. It’s just so genius—the way she captures these tiny, little shifts in emotion between people. It’s unreal. Developing a narrative that has a real sensitivity to the atmosphere of a conversation, or a character’s smallest moments of change, or confrontation—that’s what is really prominent in the work I most admire. In writing this novel, it was a process of attuning this story to my own social lens, and using that to unlock the plot and the prose—finding small moments of humor, or sadness, moments that could accumulate and start to reveal things about these characters, and their relationship, and their own emotional shifts. 

YR: I also loved how you wrote New York and the characters' relationship to it—needing the city, but resenting how it also makes them lonely. I sensed an emotional accuracy here. How did you think about New York as a character? 

AT: New York is the place I’ve lived the longest other than Florida, where I grew up. It’s my home. But there is no other place that inspires such ambivalence and vacillation between, “I love it here; it is the center of the universe; I can’t imagine living anywhere else; and I need to leave; I can’t handle this another second.” I wanted to write a book that would capture what it is to sort of hate and fear the greatest place in the world—where the intensity of living in a place of extremes is really working on a pair of characters, sort of compounding their emotional states, and either pushing them into corners, or making them feel empowered and invincible.