It is 4.06 am. Francis O'Gorman is in bed. His partner and three cats lie fast asleep beside him. But he is awake, worrying. So begins this subtle, exploratory, completely original book. -- John Carey * The Sunday Times (Culture Magazine) *
An engagingly personal quest to find out what [worry] means, both for good and bad ... some of the most striking parts of this book are those in which [O'Gorman] shares some illuminating intuition about worry - that it can be a species of self-indulgence, a way of extending ego into a conversation, or of somehow confirming selfness in the head; or that worriers might, deep down, think too highly of themselves, believe that they are too good to err and certainly too good to admit errors or apologize for them. * Times Literary Supplement *
The best parts of this book, as you would hope from a literary critic, are the textual readings. O'Gorman doesn't just provide illuminating discussions of worry literature ... He also reads worry per se as a literary trope, a comedy of mental manners in which its victims are like stage characters trapped in their humours, always enacting the same scenes and parroting the same catchphrases. He is often dryly funny himself ... While it failed to assuage any of my worries, this winning little book still made me root for and, yes, worry a little for its author. I hope this review stops him fretting for a bit, at least until the next worry arrives. -- Joe Moran * The Guardian *
Francis O'Gorman offers a witty, philosophical meditation on the meaning of worry, where it comes from and how it came to be our constant companion ... Although the visual arts and music can provide temporary distraction for the worrier, we need words - fragile, unstable words - to express it. Thankfully O'Gorman has given us some more. -- Liz Hoggard * The Independent *
In his highly anxious but very valuable new book Worrying: a Literary and Cultural History (Bloomsbury 2015), Francis O'Gorman, Professor of Victorian Literature at the University of Leeds, seeks to pin down worry as an idea and to record the stories we tell ourselves about it; he sets worrying in both its recent and its deeper cultural history, and he also contemplates the various ways writers and artists have dealt with worry as a category of experience. ... Worrying also fits into the tradition of breaking down myths and tropes into discrete units, a bit like Mircea Eliade's Myth and Reality or C. S. Lewis' Studies in Words. We care about these books because we need stories about the cultural past so that we might have a sense of ourselves in time. The real value of O'Gorman's book lies, I think, in the way it flags the politics of the stories we tell ourselves. -- Josephine Livingstone * New Republic *
[An] affectionate tribute to low-level fretting ... Mr O'Gorman is a pleasant and good-humoured guide, and his candid, self-effacing style helps mitigate any boredom. If there is a message, it addresses the ever-expanding cottage industry around happiness and well-being. ... Mr O'Gorman's celebration of the wonderful eccentricity of human nature is both refreshing and necessary. * The Economist *
In some enjoyably subversive pages, [O'Gorman] unpicks a few of modernity's best-loved fairy tales. * The Spectator *
It is worth reading for many reasons, but surely because it treats worrying as a complex issue, that is to say, as a feeling which might have a lot of good stuff to be said about it. Worrying works because it's not all doom and gloom, it avoids self-pity, and manages to have both an intellectual and personal discussion of an emotional issue from various and surprising angles. -- Charlie Pullen * The Bookbag *
Worrying is not a self-help book. In fact, it frequently pokes holes in that genre. Nor is the book spiritual in any sense. As the book's subtitle suggests, this is a literary and cultural history, as well as a personal one (O'Gorman is a self-confessed worrier). The book is an exercise in worrying about worry. -- Karen Swallow Prior, Liberty University * Christianity Today *
Keeping us up with his sleepless stresses-did I forget to lock the door downstairs?-Francis O'Gorman comes to think that such anxieties, rather than being just a niggling malfunction, might also represent a constructive aspect of the human condition. What's the use of worrying? * Rachel Bowlby, Professor of Comparative Literature, Princeton University, USA, and author of A Child of One's Own: Parental Stories *
