patricia lockwood no one is talking about this

So now Redditors are trying to bankrupt hedge-fund billionaires and fuck around with the stock market.ĭS: I feel like everyone in the UK has lost it too. In January, we had our coup, and now all of that has calmed down but I think our bodies are still so pumped with adrenaline that we don’t know what to do. I was doing OK for a while, post-election, and enjoying this little window of Donald Trump not being president anymore. Honestly, let’s be real about this, I am feeling not so good. Patricia Lockwood: Yeah, I actually don’t feel great. What are we doing?”ĭominique Sisley: So how are you feeling? This is horrible, isn’t it. “We’re acting like this is normal,” jokes Lockwood, when she sees me. Lockwood, gamine and upbeat, is lying on her bed alongside her internet-famous cat, Miette while I, hair greasy and skin grey, am at my kitchen table wrapped in a frayed blanket and hot water bottle (I wasn’t expecting it to be a video call). When I call her to discuss the book, we are both FaceTiming from our homes. No One Is Talking About This is Lockwood’s first novel, though it is based partly on her own experiences both online, and with her own family. She was then launched into the literary mainstream in 2017 when she released her acclaimed (and hilarious) memoir Priestdaddy, earning her impassioned praise from the likes of Sally Rooney and Jia Tolentino. The US poet and author first made a name for herself on social media, where her razor-sharp, idiosyncratic observations earned her the lauded title of Twitter’s “poet laureate”.

And really, there’s no one better suited to the role of narrator than Lockwood. It is frenetic and fragmented scattered with absurdist humour and deep cut meme references. The novel is an incisive study of our collective headspace. That is, until a tragic event pulls her suddenly – and urgently – back into the real world. Her mind drifts aimlessly through unhinged listicles and social media dramas, in a barely conscious state.

The book tells the story of a young woman who is famous on Twitter and obsessed with the internet (or, as she calls it, the “portal”). These are two of the questions being posed by Patricia Lockwood in her new novel, No One Is Talking About This. “Are we all just going to keep doing this until we die?” “Are we in hell?” you may ask yourself, possibly several times a day. Locked down and with nothing else to do, we can’t look away – and as our screen times spiral, the lines between our real and online lives are blurring. It’s been a strange, amorphous existence, defined by doomscrolling, glitchy Zoom meetings, and pastel-coloured Instagram infographics. For most of us, the last 12 months have been spent almost entirely online.

Patricia lockwood no one is talking about this