No Worries If Not: A Funny(ish) Story of Growing Up Working Class and Queer

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It wasn’t because she said sorry to her boss for challenging his terrible idea for a staff social, or because she apologised to the drunk girl who spilled espresso martini all over her favourite top.

The aim is to not get knocked off path and to be the first to reach Everyone’s Happy and No One’s Mad Land.Often people judge their needs and are so hard on themselves,” she says, but “we are social creatures and everyone needs a core group of people who turn up and look out for our welfare.

She made me laugh, cringe, wince and fall totally in love with her as she went on this absurd adventure and that is what entirely dominated this brilliantly entertaining story. She recounts her life from childhood, to teens, into adulthood through a mixture of short stories, spoken word, illustrations and space for the reader to reflect. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Reading it, I was surprised the terms “asker” and “guesser” weren’t more widely known or used today, seeing as social nomenclature has hit peak interest. Filled with flashbacks to the early 2000s/2010s, No Worries if Not is equally for anyone who had a porch, a fancy drama school uniform and no dead pet fish.By pretending the stakes are lower than they are, we inoculate ourselves against the embarrassment of having needs, or appearing to care if we’re rejected. The "sorry" thing is a real epidemic and by apologising all the time, to each other and to men, women really do give away so much of their power. I do think there were some very interesting ideas that I wished were looked at in more detail: the idea of women not apologising for taking up space and existing, the idea of reporting unwanted and unwelcome advances from co-workers, especially senior co-workers using said advances to manipulate women and control their careers. This is a hard-hitting yet fun coming of age book with plenty of relatable stuff (as someone who used to be an usher at a similar London theatre it was quite weird to have that be a relatable part) and a comedic tone. A rich white woman from the Upper East Side will communicate her desires differently from a black working class guy from the Bronx, and they’re nearly neighbors.