Patricia Lockwood burst onto the scene with her bestselling memoir Priestdaddy, a humorous and raunchy reflection on growing up in a very unique family with a Catholic priest for a father. This year she released her sophomore effort, No One is Talking About This, a novel that explores the inner life of a woman obsessed with writing on the internet. The narrator has achieved notoriety for her viral tweet, “Can a dog be twins?”, and has built a career lecturing in academic settings about her specific brand of internet humor. She carves out a life writing one-liners and sharing them on the internet, writing for what she calls our “new shared sense of humor” that social media has created. In this novel, writing jokes for an internet audience is described as a sort of drug addiction, a seemingly endless loop of chasing that first high of recognition, always waiting for the next hit.
The narrator is pulled out of this loop, “the portal” as she calls it, by the birth of her niece, who has serious health problems having to do with her sensory capabilities, which the doctors estimate will cut her life short to only about a year. This event yanks the narrator so forcefully out of the portal that it is alarming to both narrator and reader, as the contrast between her online world and real world becomes more clear. After moving into a spare bedroom at her sister’s house to help out with her niece, to do exercises with her to try to help her gain sensory abilities, and sometimes just hold her for long periods of time, the narrator begins thinking more deeply about the difference between vapid and superficial internet feedback loops and real connection. The earth-shattering love she feels for her niece fully consumes her, and Lockwood writes, “It was a marvel how cleanly and completely this lifted her out of the stream of regular life…She wanted to stop people on the street and say, ‘Do you know about this? You should know about this. No one is talking about this!'” This realization that everyone on the internet is living totally different lives, and that many important things happen for people outside of the portal all of the time shakes her to her core.
The magic of this novel is that part of the way through it transforms from a whip smart and witty internet novel into a moving meditation on family and grief. Halfway through the novel, just when the reader is beginning to wonder where its all going, Lockwood opts for emotion instead of laughs. Her narrator’s reflections on her niece’s experience of the world cut through the silliness of internet banter sharper than any joke could. By leaning into her very human experience of profound familial love and grief, Lockwood exposes how beautiful and messy the world can be when we bother to look up from our screens. The narrator perfectly captures how attractive life on the internet can be, how exciting it can be to gain notoriety and build an audience of people who actually want to hear what you have to say, and how devastating it is when none of the payoff of internet life translates into the real world.
No One is Talking About This is the perfect novel for this moment, capturing the unique loneliness that has become a part of nearly everyone’s lives during this time when human contact is mostly prohibited. Reading this novel, I reflected on how much time I had spent on the internet in the past year, and how little I actually remember of that time. Life in quarantine has pushed many people further into the portal of the internet and torn them away from valuable human connection. This novel is a much-needed reminder that that the lives we’ve built on the internet pale in comparison to the nuanced experience of the real world, and that while the internet can be a valuable learning tool, we have much more to learn from each other face to face. This novel does not take a moral high ground, its not a takedown of internet culture in any way (the narrator very much remains as a presence in the online world throughout the book), but a striking reflection on the fulness of what life has to offer outside of the internet. No One is Talking About This is the trendy social media novel that manages to capture love and connection in a sea of meaningless interaction.