No One Is Talking About This

It’s difficult to convey the experience of being “Extremely Online” in a novel, but Lockwood captures the ephemerality of internet culture by pairing it with a deeply emotional story. The book brilliantly juxtaposes the detached snark of internet forums with the real-life tragedy of a sick child. Is it ethical to engage with social media when our hearts are consumed by something far more important? Can we even stop ourselves?

I was blown away by this book, which beautifully captures the fragmented, jarring experience of being “Extremely Online.” The reader sees the world through the protagonist’s eyes as she scrolls, argues with strangers, and experiences the constant pressure to generate hot takes—especially once an absurd tweet propels her to celebrity.

The book conveys the tension between online interactions (ephemeral, yes, but not necessarily lacking in genuine human emotion) and serious offline issues, like the family tragedy that finally pulls the main character away from the digital fray. I laughed out loud at the over-sharing and performative virtue signaling in the… show more.

This is a very affecting novel that brings together the irony and frivolity of social media with the overwhelming joy and sadness of caring for a seriously ill child.

The first half captures perfectly the throwaway and absurdist content of Twitter humor; the second half I found to be an unexpectedly moving portrait of a young woman coping with family tragedy. I can’t think of a novel that better depicts the experience of being ‘too online’.

I’m just gonna say up front: some of you will hate this novel, so I’ll describe it as clearly as I can.

The narrator is a famous blogger who rose to international fame over a one-sentence post, after which she surrenders to a life lived online, described in poetic, incandescent, at times infuriatingly overwritten prose. That’s Part 1, which ends with a thudding fall to earth: a text from Mom saying Come home. Part Two is a switcheroo in both style and content, and that’s all I can tell you without wrecking the novel’s unexpected turn. 

I know what… show more.

Sometimes something (anything from a book to a person to a song, and anything in between) gives you an extremely uncomfortable, visceral feeling; like a stick jabbing at a part of you that is unfamiliar. This is what Lockwood did for me in No One is Talking About This. The book asked me to push through the impulse to set it down because it made me “feel too much” of this thing that was unfamiliar, but I didn’t. Instead, I leaned into this “feeling” and continued to read. After working through some confusion, I understood the central message of… show more.

Patricia Lockwood’s novel catches the weird rhythms of our digital lives, exploring the ways our jokes and observations and obsessions swirl around in the collective mind of social media. She is brilliantly funny on the contortions and kinks of our online language. No writer is better at skewering the neuroses behind a meme, the irony of hashtags, and documenting the subtle ways our own realities get filtered through the profane and wonderful prism of the internet. This is an obscene and hilarious book with a tender, tragic heart.