"They were consuming me"

Alexandra Tanner on the beautiful horror of trad wives and her new book, WORRY

When I first started thinking and writing about momfluencer culture, it was relatively uncharted territory in mainstream media, but I was by no means alone in having thoughts and feelings about the selling of motherhood online. Kathryn Jezer-Morton,

lyz

, and

kate lindsay

all contributed work to the momfluencer canon before me, and academics have been studying the culture prior to most of us being met with a momfluencer-centric headline from Vox or Glamour in our various feeds.

One piece from those early days (to be clear, I’m talking about 2020 lol) was written by Alexandra Tanner. In a piece about some of the most horrifying and mesmerizing momfluencers out there, Alexandra writes with a stream of consciousness mania that feels perfectly suited to the bewilderment of internet rabbit holes, and neatly shows how what we consume online can ultimately consume us.

Alexandra’s new book, Worry, is about some of the culture’s most infamous mommies: the preppers, the pastel Qanon mamas, the TERFy freebirthers, the alt-right trad wives, the Vitamin D truthers, and the mothers who really hate shoes. It is a wide, wild world, and Alexandra excavates it with humor, pathos, and sensitivity.

But Worry is more than a book about Insta-mommies. It’s also a book about the impossibility of crafting one’s “authentic” identity or living a “good” life under capitalism. It’s about our longing to be mothered. It’s about the claustrophobic and life-giving push/pull between sisters who love each other, need each other, and often hurt each other without understanding how to stop. It’s also a book about the most memorable dog I’ve ever met within the pages of a book; Amy Klobuchar, a little mutt who’s just as broken and deserving of love as the rest of us. I can’t wait to see who they cast as AK in THE SHOW (!)

It was an absolute joy to talk to Alexandra Tanner about all of the above and more. This is such a juicy conversation (WE NAME NAMES), and if you even remotely enjoyed it, you will adore Worry.

Easily in my top five book covers of maybe ALL TIME?!

Sara

Ok. Let’s start with the obvious question. When did you get obsessed with your mommies and what sort of holes do you think the obsession filled for you (or felt like it was filling)? 

Alexandra

I started casually following a few of them in 2019, but early 2020 was when I like–turned it into a part of my day and made a separate account so I could keep them all in one place and look at them in a really immersive way. I think that period of time was just so frightening and unprecedented and the way we were all talking to each other was so insane–there wasn’t a conscious tipping point into the mommies obsession, for me, I think it was more just that I was adjusting to this constant influx of fear and misery and stupidity and starting to feel like I needed it around the clock. 

Sara

Tea question - the “ballerina turned prepper” you reference in the book - is this a fictional amalgamation or IS SHE REAL? Related: can you share some of your specific mommies? The ones who crawled under your skin and maybe into your dreams? What was it about them? Do they continue to compel you or not so much?

Alexandra

She’s kind of Ballerina Farm. But the mommies as they appear in the novel are mostly amalgamations of one another. Which probably ends up being unfair to them as individuals, but for them to serve the novel as this kind of noisy Greek chorus–I had to make a choice to employ the mommies to serve the narrative, because at a certain point my interest moved from looking at them on a microscopic level to seeing how they worked on this one specific character in this one specific way. 

Lauren Ockey was my first. You always remember your first. Lolo Webb was huge for me, too, foundational. I just checked in on her as I was writing this answer and it looks like she’s made her husband get maybe his third or fourth vasectomy recently… He’s always having them done, and then reversing them when she wants another baby, and then having them done again… Never change, Lolo!!!! They’re kind of the sweeties of the bunch, though. They’re innocuous, they just love having 12 boys. Some of the really vile ones, though, they would get their accounts deleted so often that I wouldn’t know how to find them now–Jodie was this one awful mommy whose name I remember but not her handle. She was always filming herself licking shit in grocery stores to prove that germs were good. She would post scary envelopes labeled “varicella” and stuff and be like “The black-market homeopathic vaccines I ordered for my children arrived!” She was a camel milk advocate, making her autistic son drink imported camel milk three times a day because she thought it was curing him. It’s heartbreaking. It’s this twisted version of what’s so beautiful about motherhood to me from the outside–the idea that you go to any extreme for your child, that you would do anything to make your child safe. 

I don’t look at them at all anymore–during the last few months of book promotion stuff, I’ve checked in on a couple of them here and there, but I’m really out of the game. I’m not kidding when I say they were consuming me, making me really hateful and mean. I started really perversely looking forward to this, like, ritual of spending time on my phone, working myself up into a really impotent half-anger, then having nothing to do with it but just let it eat away at me and make me brittle.

Sara

Following a description of some of the most unhinged QAnon/conspiritualist/white nationalist mommies, Jules (your protagonist) says to herself: “Things aren’t so bad in my life, I think. At least I’m not one of these people or one of their followers. Then I realize that I am, of course, one of their followers—a devoted one, even, in my own fucked little way.” Holy shit I feel attacked lol. I continuously struggle with my motivations for following people like Kelly Havens Stickle for example - like, YES, it’s in my job description to culturally critique this stuff, but where professional interest bleed into toxic voyeurism?

Alexandra

NOT KELLY HAVENS STICKLE….. I’m being catapulted into the past here, oh my god. That’s a name I haven’t heard in a minute. She’s still up to all her old tricks, it looks like…. She’s like if you gave an AI machine the Outlander theme song and the Salter House website and directed it to build a person from those two things. 

It’s such a fine line. What we consume and what we spend our time looking at makes us who we are. Even if you try to hold the things you consume at arms’ length or tell  yourself you’re just making fun of something or someone, they become a part of you. Jules can sort of get herself to the point of having this realization, but she can’t really compel herself to do anything about it–and that’s not a judgment, I think that’s true for most of us. 

Sara

Jules is drawn to performances of motherhood online AND she has an incredibly fraught relationship with her mother (who I think she longs to be mothered by) AND she acts as a maternal figure for her sister Poppy. Did you explicitly want to explore the more expansive definition of motherhood or did it sort of appear within the writing process? I don’t think I’d thought so much about my own needs to be mothered (for example) until I had kids. As adults, we really want mommies!

“Fuck,” Poppy says, wiping away a set of huge tears. “Why do we need her so much? Why do I feel like I need her so much?”

“Because all anyone wants is to be mothered. Taken care of.” I say.

Poppy sniffles. “Is that what you learned about America this year? From your mommies?”

“No,” I say. “It’s what I learned about you, and it’s what I learned about me.”

Alexandra

We really want mommies!!! The way Jules’s mental illness manifests is that she has this insatiable need for a texture of certainty or a particular illusion of safety that doesn’t exist anywhere in life except for in the moments in childhood when your mother is reassuring you of something. I don’t even know that that’s something she explicitly realizes on the page in that kind of language? But once that announced itself to me as the thing that was driving her spiral down into her anxieties and her compulsions, it helped me to see how the online mommies were going to function in this kind of ballet with Jules’s own interactions with her mother. And with how she was going to endeavor to try to make the world safe for Poppy–an impossible task.  

Sara

Your book is a beautiful illustration of living a life Very Online, whether one really wants to or not. Poppy says at one point “I hate Amazon but I’ll never stop using it.” This really sums up the combinations of idealism and consumerism the internet seems to inspire. How did writing this book impact your thoughts about surviving in capitalism while also trying to resist capitalism?

Alexandra

I hate that I’m a cynical person, that I’m not a put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is person. But I am. I’m never going to compost. I’m an American girl, I’m lazy. I don’t know that I can resist capitalism: that’s where capitalism has brought us. I can reject capitalism the same way I can reject the idea that there should be borders between nations. But we live in the world we live in. If I stop shopping on Amazon, Amazon continues. I just don’t get my shit delivered in nine hours. I guess the answer is this book didn’t make me more optimistic about anything!!!! But it also showed me that I’m maybe two emotional or ideological yards ahead of where I was five years ago in that I’m learning to take small actions that are meaningful to me, that I can die proud of, without doing that performative “girl-who’s-going-to-be-okay” thing about them. 

Sara

Freedom is a big theme for many of the momfluencers you write about. Freedom from sunscreen. Freedom from shoes. Freedom from Big Government. Freedom to fabricate facts. Freedom to raise a little white army by way of pregnancy and childbirth. Many of these “freedoms” are dependent on making other people less free, or at least dependent on having enough social and financial capital to make freedom a full-time pursuit. I recently read Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger and kept thinking about the disorienting ways people can view the same content and come away with entirely different understandings of that content. It’s frightening! Would love your thoughts.

Alexandra

Whoa, mostly I’m just having my mind blown by the way you’re phrasing all this–yeah, the quest for total personal freedom is one of those uniquely American things that’s such a curse, such a devastating casualty of capitalism and individualism. Freedom from shoes. I mean, my god. We created shoes for the purpose of freedom from gangrenous foot wounds, but whatever. I have to go pick up Doppelganger like today, everyone is talking about it and so many people have been telling me to read it. There are so many people who look at this one mommy’s foot-prison content (@alicellani…. if you know you know) and are like “You go girl!” but it’s just like: take a look at what in your life is oppressing you so greatly that you have to take it out on the concept of shoes. 

Sara

Jules has dreams (maybe halfhearted dreams?) of working on a project about her mommies, that explores the intersection of the “banal” and “dangerous,” and really that IS IT. The same mommy who shares homemade baby food recipes might share “research” about the new world order. What is it about Instagram that simultaneously renders the banal glorious or aspirational and the dangerous innocuous? 

Alexandra

There’s an evil energy on Instagram that’s very particular–very different from the evil energy on Twitter or TikTok. I think it might be because of what a visual platform it is, or that it’s the site of a lot of striving and posturing and self-promotion, or some confluence of those two things. I’m thinking about infographics. Leftist politics infographics, flat-earther infographics: they all use the same visual structure. There’s this flattening that happens where exactly as you’re saying, the quotidian can seem magical or the terrifying can seem very palatable. It’s hard to put into words, but it seems like the place where people are the most self-absorbed and the least self-aware.  

Sara

Jules is devastatingly relatable in her desire to reinvent herself. You write:

“Maybe I’ll start making smoothies with anti-inflammatory powders in them that’ll boost my concentration and my collagen. Maybe I’ll start taking folic acid every day. Maybe I’ll start an HITT regimen. Maybe I’ll go to HITT classes on my lunch breaks. Maybe I’ll even look at my phone for an hour in the morning and an hour at night. Maybe not even that. Maybe I’ll get a Nokia like this one half-famous writer I admire and I’ll never look at a candy-bright smartphone screen ever again. Maybe I’ll start keeping fresh flowers in the house. Maybe I’ll move to the woods. Maybe i’ll finally find a life of plenty. Maybe tonight I’ll tell Poppy all these plans and order her to move out by the end of the month so I can start my new existence.”

Some people theorize that consumerism and the unquenchable hunger for epiphanies or transformation is a replacement for religion, spirituality, and/or community. What do you think? 

Alexandra

The ways we fantasize about changing our lives are inherently tied to what we can consume, especially what we can consume with ease. Actually changing your life means making small decisions consistently, honoring yourself enough to have faith that you’re growing even if your own growth feels invisible–it involves such an epistemological shift in the way American culture has taught us to think that it’s nearly impossible. Religious beliefs, spirituality, community, self-care, responsibility to others–those are things you build really slowly and intentionally, and that’s hard work, work without an end. We don’t like when things are hard and we don’t like to be on the clock so we often just don’t do it. 

Sara

SISTERHOOD. There are not enough books about sisters so thank you for your service here! You write (as Jules): “If I were still writing, I’d write a shitty short story about us and what we’re going through and how there are no words for it, and in it there’d be a sentence like: Having a sister is looking in a cheap mirror: what’s there is you, but unfamiliar and ugly for it.” Why did you want to write about sisters? And why is the sister relationship so universally rich/complicated/fraught? 

Alexandra

There aren’t all that many books about sisters!!! I was surprised, as I was wrapping up the manuscript and starting to look for comps, to find that it’s still a niche. And I don’t think I’m, like, reinventing the genre or whatever, but I do think WORRY is a unique sisters story in a couple ways. I wrote two characters who are similar in a lot of ways to my younger brother Jess and I. Jess is trans, and our relationship–even when the only word we had for what we were to each other was “sisters”--has always kind of existed beyond the bounds of gender. We never really felt interested in or united by femininity, or these shared rites of passage that come with traditional sisterhood. When we get called “ladies” on the street, or whatever, we joke that there’s maybe half of a lady between the two of us. And while Jules and Poppy aren’t us, I’d like to think that what makes them singular as characters are the parts of them that do come from us: the parts of them that exist beyond traditional ideas of what makes sisters sisters. They’re these two souls trapped in purgatory. They both live largely in their own minds. They’re essentially failing at womanhood in a lot of ways, and they’re taking it out on one another.  

There’s endless complication and confusion and beauty in a relationship between sisters. You are each other’s mirrors in a way–but it’s so easy to rest on that idea and fail to spend time getting to know your sister as a person separate from you. And then when you do start to think of your sister as separate from you, it creates this existential misery of like: How dare you be different from me, how dare you surpass me, how dare you free yourself from some family dynamic or inescapable trait that I thought was really binding us together!!! We see it in Cassandra at the Wedding, in Housekeeping, in All My Puny Sorrows, in Rebecca Curtis’s “The Toast.” The writer Courtney Bush, an incredible mind, someone I’m such a huge fan of, recently said something beautiful to me about how the traditional stakes of literature can’t hold the weight of the true stakes of sisterhood: “the stakes of trying to understand if you’ve been an ok steward to the world for your little sister.”

Sara

Anything else you want to add? Long live Amy Klobuchar! 

Alexandra

Literally long live Amy Klobuchar!!!!! 

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