Review: NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT THIS by Patricia Lockwood
This review contains some minor spoilers.
In the first week of this year, I decided to stop using Twitter. It was like a light switching on. I had been scrolling back through my most popular tweets of 2022, and stumbled upon a Tweet where I had been slightly rude and condescending to another person. The response, months old by that point, was: “You have hundreds of thousands of tweets. Do you do anything else with your life?”
I experienced that horrible stomach-lurching moment where you don’t really want to admit that someone else, annoying as they are, is right about you.
“What the Hell am I doing?” I asked.
I have been on Twitter under various guises and names for getting on ten years now. Many of my friendships have come from using it. It has certainly done a lot to shape my sense of humour and my vocabulary.
To begin with, Twitter favoured those who affected a kind of detached ironism, a commitment to insincerity. These new humorists, purveyors of a kind of gonzo journalism for the Net Generation, came to be known as “Weird Twitter”. The most popular Weird Twitter user of all time, @dril, is at the time of writing engaged in a gleeful rivalry with the site’s current owner, billionaire idiot Elon Musk.
One of the people who arrived on the Weird Twitter scene back in the early 2010s was Patricia Lockwood, who went viral various times for tweets such as “.@parisreview so is paris any good or not” and, more famously, “you KICK miette? you kick her body like the football? oh! oh! jail for mother! jail for mother for One Thousand Years!!!!”
It is against this backdrop that Lockwood writes No One Is Talking About This, a kind of long-form prose-poem / autofictional third-person memoir, split into two parts. The first part, almost plotless, evokes the scattered, neverending pipeline of content and interpersonal dramas experienced by the average Extremely Online social media user. The second part relates the tragic story of the unnamed protagonist’s sister and the birth of her niece with a severe disability.
Many books have been written about Internet culture and tried to capture the feeling of memes and of the experience of being capital-O Online. This is the only book I have ever read that truly evinces that bizarre other-world, the chaos, the hate campaigns that to an outsider make you look certifiably insane. Why did anyone in the world give a shit about Bean Dad?
For the book’s first half, the unnamed protagonist – who is a heavily fictionalised depiction of Lockwood herself, but is not Lockwood; Lockwood never went viral for Tweeting “Can a dog be twins?” but that idle thought resembles some of the output from her heyday – exists in this ironic mode, irreverently reacting to the world around her even as a fascist government takes power in 2016 and filmed police brutality becomes a major topic of discussion. This section can be taken as slightly self-deprecating: Lockwood parodies her own posting style, delving into the psychology, the biological need for that dopamine hit of likes and RTs for posting some absurdist aphorism on an idle afternoon.
But then her sister becomes pregnant. The pregnancy goes wrong. And the bottom falls out of the protagonist’s world. She spends less time online and more time in the real world, in and out of hospital rooms and neonatal ICUs. A living nightmare takes root in the interconnected story of her family, and she is forced for the first time to experience the agony the world inflicts; her forays into the “portal”, the narrative’s term for the online world, feel increasingly disconnected with the real problems unfurling around her.
The question of this novel is, simply, that of what we do when the irony runs out, when we are faced with things that we cannot face through insincerity and irreverence. It is easy to react to Trump, to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, to climate change with a kind of dispassionate, wry chuckle. But there are some things which we cannot post our way out of.
I have seen it said by some that this book just doesn’t work for them. I can understand why. This book is by, about, and maybe even for an extremely specific kind of person. The kind of person that knows what it is like to be terminally online, while making fun of other people for being terminally online. The kind of person that, faced abruptly with a mirror of what their online life is, what they have become, slips from that world.
I didn’t find this book. This book found me. It articulates disquieting thoughts I’ve had about my online life for quite some time. This may just be one of the best books I’ve read this decade.
★★★★★
This review was also posted on Goodreads. Illustration by Jeremy Perkins on Unsplash.