If you’ve got kids, you’ve got worries. That’s pretty much how this parenting thing works. But something about raising kids these days feels different. Everything about parenting feels incredibly high stakes. This is something I write about at length in my most recent book, Happy Parents, Happy Kids. And it’s an issue that author Jessica Westhead tackles as well in her latest novel, Worry.
Worry is a thoughtful and multilayered book that explores the many factors—both personal and societal—that might cause a parent to retreat to a place of worry. Initially, the reader isn’t quite sure why the main character, Ruth, seems to spends so much time worrying about her four-year-old daughter, but, over time, those worries begin to make sense. At the start of the novel, we sense that something is wrong, but it takes us a long time to figure out what that “something” is (almost as long as it takes Ruth to acknowledge that “something” to herself). The result is a psychologically complex and highly captivating novel that insists that you keep turning pages as a way to relieve your own worry about what’s going to happen to these characters. Bottom line? If the sections of Happy Parents, Happy Kids that explore why anxiety is pretty much baked into the experience of modern parenting resonated with you, you’ll want to pick up a copy of Worry, too.
I recently had the opportunity to interview Jessica Westhead about her book. What follows are the highlights of that conversation: my questions and Jessica’s answers.
Q. Parents are often ridiculed for being “too anxious” and yet sometimes anxiety is a perfectly rational response to the state of the world and/or an individual parent’s life experience. What would you say to parents like Ruth who are harshly criticized or judged for worrying “too much" about their kids?
A: I love this question, because it does bother me when Ruth’s worrying is written off as over-the-top. You make such a good point—we live in a world right now that is full of things to worry about. People are becoming (I think/hope) more aware of the need for social justice, and positive change is happening there, slowly, but the backlash from “mainstream” (AKA white, straight, mostly middle-class and middle-aged) society that keeps building as historically marginalized groups of people are gaining (a tiny bit of) ground is very frightening. Climate change, of course, is the most terrifying thing of all, and we all have to do this elaborate compartmentalization dance just to go about our lives with some semblance of calm in the face of it. Meanwhile, go to any toy store and you see more and more of these awful “surprise” toy abominations wrapped in layer upon layer of non-recyclable plastic, and these are the only things my daughter and her friends want. The waste makes me sick to my stomach. Add all of that to whatever other worries each parent carries around with them because of their own individual traumas, and it’s a wonder that we’re not all just curled up in the fetal position, covering our eyes and ears and humming desperately to ourselves. So yes, I empathize with Ruth. I’m an anxious parent myself. I would tell parents like us that’s it okay to worry; that we shouldn’t add “worrying about worrying too much” to the pile. BUT we also need to think about how our kids will perceive our anxiety, and how they’ll absorb it from us. I want my daughter to fill up with love for herself and the world and the people in it, and there won’t be room enough for that if she’s too full of (my) worry. So far, I think I’m doing an okay job of staying hopeful and focusing on the good things. Gratitude helps with that enormously—I’m so thankful for my family and our friends and the communities I’m part of, and the opportunities I’ve had—and being grateful gives me the energy to keep moving forward. And to be kind to myself when the worries creep in, as they always do.
Q. The sections of your book that were anchored in a character’s earlier experiences of loss really resonated with me. (I’m deliberately being vague because I don’t want to spoil any parts of your book for other readers.) Could you talk a little bit about how earlier experiences of loss can amplify feelings of anxiety and why you felt it was important to address this in your book?
A: I mentioned compartmentalization in my first answer, and I’ll return to that idea here. Ruth is also doing her own elaborate dance to escape painful memories by keeping them locked away. I wrote the odd-numbered flashback chapters in Worry as a way to show the separateness of those memories, which gradually seep back into Ruth’s awareness until she can’t hide from them anymore. Being out of her element and on Stef’s turf (Stef and her husband Sammy own the cottage where the story is set) makes Ruth feel very vulnerable, and at first she has her guard up. But then Stef wears her down, and Ruth finds relief in the permissiveness of “Cottage Time”—where it’s acceptable and even expected for the adults to forgo responsibility and embrace relaxation (aided by lots of drinking). With this freedom from her regular routine, there's more opportunity for self-reflection, and Ruth’s thoughts end up drifting back to the past events (and losses) that shaped her present worries. I had four early miscarriages before giving birth to my daughter, and I know many women who had similar experiences or went through much more traumatic pregnancy losses. Some of them have children now, and some of them don’t. When my daughter was younger, I often wondered what life would’ve been like if we hadn’t had the good fortune of having her. Worry grew out of that wondering.
Q. What was the hardest thing for you about writing this book and what has been the most rewarding thing?
A: I wrote the first draft of Worry ridiculously quickly. Once I got going, it was almost as if I couldn’t NOT write it if I tried. I’ve had entire scenes from short stories arrive in my brain fully formed before, but this experience was something else entirely, and such a gift. For those feverish few months, I was waking up at all hours of the night and writing for long stretches of time in my notebook by flashlight, watching my pen fly across the pages as the words poured out of me. In the morning, I’d have all this new material and then I’d just keep going. From the very beginning, when the idea for Worry first came to me, I knew that the story would take place at a cottage, I knew who all the characters were, and I knew that the basic storyline had to do with my protagonist’s worry for her only child. So I was able to write a plot outline early on, which gave me extra momentum because I could progress scene by scene (even if I didn’t know how it was all going to end). So that was absolutely the most rewarding part. The hardest part was when the rose-coloured glasses fell off, after I'd finished that draft in an exultant haze, and I realized it wasn’t remotely close to being done. The next few years were a slog. The ending was the biggest problem—it never felt right, even after two major revisions. After the euphoric ease of the first draft, I was disillusioned and disheartened by how much I had to struggle with the rewrites, and still couldn’t figure out how to fix what was wrong. Fortunately, I have a brilliant agent (Sam Hiyate with The Rights Factory) and several incredibly supportive and perceptive first readers who had my back. With their feedback (on multiple drafts), and lots of walking around and letting my mind wander around the story, along with the encouragement of Patrick Crean (who’d seen a spark in a too-early draft of Worry that we'd submitted to publishers much too soon, but fortunately it caught Patrick's attention and that’s how I ended up at HarperCollins), I was able to re-envision the story and make the connections that led to the “final” draft that I re-submitted to HarperCollins, and it was accepted. Ultimately, it was decided that Jennifer Lambert would be my editor, since we’re about the same age and have kids about the same age, so she would (and did!) have a more intimate understanding of Ruth’s journey as a mother, as well as the intricacies of female friendships. Now that Worry is out in the world, the enthusiastic reception from readers that I’ve seen so far has been so incredibly gratifying. I’m happy that I did the work to tell this story the way I really wanted to tell it.
Ann Douglas is the author of numerous books about pregnancy and parenting including, most recently, Happy Parents, Happy Kids. She is also the weekend parenting columnist for CBC Radio.