For generations of New Yorkers, the summer share house on Long Island has been a rite of passage. It’s the place where you have wild sex and drink to excess in the years after leaving your family of origin but before you’ve discovered your family of choice.
Meryl Branch-McTiernan’s debut novel, What You Should Worry About, features a share house on Fire Island (dubbed Mermaid LeGoon) where aspiring screenwriter Layla Moody rides out the early months of the pandemic.
Though her mother warns her that going to a house full of people in the middle of a global pandemic will make her a pariah, Layla craves the happy summers she spent there in her twenties. Now, after a bad breakup with an unreliable, temperamental boyfriend, she doesn’t want to be alone. Plus, she has issues to work out.
For as long as she can remember, Layla has wanted to be a writer and achieve immortality through her art. “I wrote about my life so my memories and conversations and musings would outlast my corporeal form,” she thinks as she’s soaking in a hot tub at the Sundance Film Festival, where she has gone to network in early 2020.
Seven years earlier, Lalya wrote a script that placed in a minor screenplay-writing competition; she then decided it was now or never, and packed up and moved to Los Angeles. But since then, nothing has quite worked out for her — professionally or romantically — and, at the ripe old age of thirty-seven, her biological clock is ticking loudly.
However, a chance encounter in that same hot tub at Sundance with a feminist director Layla has long admired leads to an interview with an executive at HBO, who demands a meeting in her old New York stomping grounds. She returns, but much has changed since she left.
Her father, who used to wake her up on Saturday mornings with his rendition of Frank Sinatra’s “Theme from New York, New York,” has died; her mother has relocated to Florida,.. And within weeks of her return, the mayor declares a state of emergency and shuts down the city.
Initially, Layla rankles at all the quarantine restrictions. But slowly, the gravity of the situation sinks in. She acquires her first mask, haunts the aisles of Rite Aid because it’s one of the few places that’s open, and, like many other New Yorkers, becomes smitten with then-Governor Andrew Cuomo’s daily Covid briefings. Even so, after two months, the isolation becomes unbearable, and she decides to re-up for the summer at Mermaid LeGoon even though most of her old crowd has moved on.
Branch-McTiernan handles the surreal aspects of the early days of the pandemic with subtlety and wit. The writing about sex, on the other hand, is slapstick and in graphic detail. One scene in which Layla discovers a novel use for a sausage recalls Alexander Portnoy’s adventures with liver in Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint.
When Layla was at Sundance, she admitted to herself that she sometimes wished she lived in a rom-com, where there was a right guy and a wrong guy and everyone showed their true colors before it was too late. With this book, Branch-McTiernan has written a rom-com in which a feisty, feminist heroine romances herself.
Ann Levin is a writer, book reviewer, and former editor at The Associated Press. Her memoir and nonfiction have been published in numerous literary magazines and she has read her stories on stage with the New York-based writers group Writers Read.
