No One Is Talking About This

No One Is Talking About This

Patricia Lockwood

Enjoyment: Quality: Characters: Plot:

4 ratings • 1 reviews

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.


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  • Enjoyment: Quality: Characters: Plot:

    I thought the first half/part was funny and didn't get too cringy (like a lot of internet-focus novels can). The second part depicted grief in a unique relationship, and I think it resonated with me particularly at this moment in my life. There were also some very poetic moments that reflected on social media, relationships, and life.

    Favorite quote:
    "When she was a child, the thing she feared most — besides pooping little eggs - was having the hiccups for 55 years, like the cursed man she had read about in her water-damaged Guinness Book. But when she came of age she realized that everything about life was having the hiccups for 55 years. Waking up, hic, standing in the steaming headspace of the shower, hic, hearing her own name called from the other room and feeling that faint electric volt of who I am, hic, hic, hic. No amount of sugar-eating or being scared would help." (41%)

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