Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This has an unusual writing style that made me think for some time before I could fully settle into its rhythm. The novel is divided into two distinct halves, each offering a different lens on modern life. In the beginning, we follow an unnamed narrator as she drifts through online culture, a space she simply calls “the portal.” This section mirrors the fragmented, addictive nature of the internet: the endless scrolling, the half-formed thoughts, the vapid humor that somehow keeps us hooked. Lockwood captures the feeling of a mind shaped by the internet, one that constantly seeks stimulation yet is overloaded with noise.

The narrator travels the world giving talks about the portal. Being inside her mind in this first half feels like spending time with someone who’s been extremely online for too long which describes most of us these days.

Then the book takes a sharp, devastating turn. The second half, which Lockwood describes as autofiction, centers on a family crisis. Suddenly, the narrator is forced to step out of the portal and into a reality that is tender and unbearably fragile. Here, Lockwood explores grief, love, consciousness, and the strange way real life keeps happening even as the online world continues to buzz in the background.

I admired how the book captures today’s world with such clarity and originality. Lockwood writes about the internet as both a mirror and a distortion, and then she brings us into a story that reminds us what truly matters when everything else falls away.

This book becomes a portrait of what it means to be chronically online but also what it means to be human. It’s about love, loss, the joy of connection, and the ache of letting go.

My Favorite Bits

• It was a mistake to believe that other people were not living as deeply as you were. Besides, you were not even living that deeply.

• “What is it like to have a child right now?” she asked her brother after everyone else had gone to sleep, as the fake flames crackled at their feet—and what was it about them that made them fake, she wondered for the hundredth time. “Oh, it’s great,” he told her. “Everything’s on fire, so you np longer have to worry about doing a good job.”

• “The future of intelligence must be about search, while the future of ignorance must be about the inability to evaluate information. But when she looked at the smoking landscape of fathers laid out by cable news, it seemed no longer a question of intelligence or ignorance, but one of infection.”

• You know this baby’s gonna be a world traveler bitch, her sister would write, in response to the steady flow of picture from overseas. She’s gonna go everywhere and see everything, gonna get every stamp in her passport. And each time without fail, she responded, if the world is still there when she gets here haha.

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Author: Patricia Lockwood
Publication date: 16 February 2021
Number of pages: 210 pages

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