Synopses & Reviews
FINALIST FOR THE 2021 BOOKER PRIZE & A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BOOK OF 2021
"A book that reads like a prose poem, at once sublime, profane, intimate, philosophical, witty and, eventually, deeply moving." New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice
"Wow. I can't remember the last time I laughed so much reading a book. What an inventive and startling writer...I'm so glad I read this. I really think this book is remarkable." David Sedaris
From a formidably gifted writer (The New York Times Book Review), a book that asks: Is there life after the internet?
As this urgent, genre-defying book opens, a woman who has recently been elevated to prominence for her social media posts travels around the world to meet her adoring fans. She is overwhelmed by navigating the new language and etiquette of what she terms the portal, where she grapples with an unshakable conviction that a vast chorus of voices is now dictating her thoughts. When existential threats — from climate change and economic precariousness to the rise of an unnamed dictator and an epidemic of loneliness — begin to loom, she posts her way deeper into the portal's void. An avalanche of images, details, and references accumulate to form a landscape that is post-sense, post-irony, post-everything. Are we in hell? the people of the portal ask themselves. Are we all just going to keep doing this until we die?
Suddenly, two texts from her mother pierce the fray: Something has gone wrong, and How soon can you get here? As real life and its stakes collide with the increasingly absurd antics of the portal, the woman confronts a world that seems to contain both an abundance of proof that there is goodness, empathy, and justice in the universe, and a deluge of evidence to the contrary.
Fragmentary and omniscient, incisive and sincere, No One Is Talking About This is at once a love letter to the endless scroll and a profound, modern meditation on love, language, and human connection from a singular voice in American literature.
Review
“Lockwood’s book got its hooks into me inside of two pages. Her observations about the pace and timbre and temperature and specific toxic weight of social media are so incisive, so perfectly-pitched, that they’re like being shown portrait after portrait of oneself. In the second half of the book, when the world of hopes and genes and expectations pierces the rich wall of digital static, the effect is vertiginous, the pain profound, the tenderness of the family responding to crisis so real and so vivid that we feel present in the rooms with them as they learn the parameters of their grief. And not just grief, which is another of this book’s great gifts. Lockwood saves her keenest, her best language for writing about the world of caring for a child with a debilitating genetic condition, the vocabulary of care, harder to describe than the Internet by half. This novel is a blessing, a gift, a difficult and great thing in the world.” John Darnielle, author of Wolf in White Van
Review
“An insightful — frequently funny, often devastating — meditation on human existence online and off.” Kirkus (Starred Review)
Review
"Explores the kind of tumult and grief that almost defies language as well as the frightening uniformity of the online herds." The New York Times
About the Author
Patricia Lockwood was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana and raised in all the worst cities of the Midwest. She is the author of the novel No One Is Talking About This, a 2021 Booker Prize finalist, and the memoir Priestdaddy, which was named one of the ten best books of 2017 by The New York Times Book Review, and two poetry collections, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black and Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, a New York Times Notable Book. Lockwood's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and the London Review of Books, where she is a contributing editor.