Must Be Alchemy

I didn’t expect to spend Thanksgiving morning snort laughing and snot crying at my dad’s house in Upstate New York while watching snow flurries flutter by outside the dining room window. 

But I dared pick up Anna Cox’s  I Keep My Worries In My Teeth. 

For those of you who are purists and don’t believe in dog-earing pages let alone [shudder] taking notes in the margins, skip this review. I marked the shit out of this exceptional novel. No fewer than 100 sentences are highlighted, I wrote copious notes in the margins and about 35% of the pages are folded over.

I Keep My Worries In My Teeth is the story of three women in a small Ohio town whose lives are upended when there is a freak accident at the town’s pencil factory. To tell you any more of the plot would be to ruin the experience of diving into this novel blind.

Ruth Stanhope is a photographer who makes her living transforming negatives into positives. She is also battling an enormous grief that often sneaks up on her like a trickster. 

Esther Spark keeps her worries in her teeth by working at the pencil factory utilizing her prowess for biting pencils to good purpose. She is dogged by anxiety and loneliness which can only be quenched by literally chomping down on things around her.

And Frankie Rosenblum is the daughter of the pencil factory’s owner; a teenager in love for the first time who is navigating  a new normal after being injured in the accident at the plant. 

On a micro level, Cox’s novel is a string of brilliant sentence after brilliant sentence. It is astonishing to me how the 26 letters of the alphabet can turn into something so beautiful. Cox must be an alchemist. 

On a macro level, it is one of the most impressive explorations of grief, loneliness, anxiety and first love I’ve encountered in literature.

You’d think with these weighty themes the novel would get bogged down in heaviness. But it doesn’t. Instead, it is effervescent and bubbling with laugh-out-loud funny moments. It is quirky, peculiar, and uplifting. 

I Keep My Worries In My Teeth is the only 5+ star novel I’ve read in 2025. It is Plato’s ideal of the perfect literary novel. Cox’s gem joins my other all-time favorites: Trevanian’s Shibumi which is the perfect spy novel, and The Sparrow, Maria Doria Russell’s perfect work of science fiction.