Hypertext Magazine asked Debra Monroe, author of It Takes a Worried Woman, “Why did you write a book about worry?”
By Debra Monroe
I’d stopped writing entirely because of the 2016-2018 upsurge of hate crimes that made national headlines. Because my daughter, a Black college student, was targeted over and over.
When I began writing again, I was avoiding the subject. I wrote instead about the ubiquitous pressure to marry when I was a single mother. I wrote about the cycle of intergenerational violence in my family. I wrote about the sexism packed into the cultural obsession with the strong, silent type. I wrote about a film studies pornography seminar I once took—twenty women watching pornography in the living room of a male professor because the department didn’t own a VCR. I started to see that personal problems and the partial solutions I devised were embedded in circumstances outside my control. Or anyone’s. And I saw how often was using the word worry, a gendered word.
When a man scans the horizon for looming emergencies and prepares strategy, we call this leadership. When a woman does, we talk about anxiety and self-care. I came to see worry as a way of planning my adaptive moves in a tricky landscape, navigating the coded sexism that stays unspeakable and the explicit sexism for which there aren’t quick fixes. And finally I wrote about worry as a way of encountering the violent racism I’d witnessed as a parent.
The book tells stories of course. But it also evaluates worry as useful: planning for trouble that will occur, but you don’t know its exact form yet. I got good at this—I worried as problem-solving for so long and often, at times to good effect. Worry is sometimes pointless. But sometimes it’s fixing what you can, sidestepping the rest. That sort of worry is strength exerting.
Related Feature: Excerpt: Debra Monroe’s IT TAKES A WORRIED WOMAN
Debra Monroe is the author of two story collections, The Source of Trouble and A Wild, Cold State; two novels, Newfangled and Shambles; two memoirs, On the Outskirts of Normal and My Unsentimental Education; and a new essay collection, It Takes a Worried Woman.
She is also the editor of the anthology Contemporary Creative Nonfiction. Her essays have appeared in many venues, including Longreads, The Southern Review, The New York Times, The American Scholar, and have been cited as Notable in Best American Essays.