No One Is Talking About This
Patricia Lockwood
Named a “Most Anticipated Book of 2021” by Harper's Bazaar, Vulture, O, the Oprah Magazine, Parade, Refinery29, Good Housekeeping, The Guardian, WIRED, USA Today, Buzzfeed, Esquire, AV Club, and more!
“No One Is Talking About This reaches for the sublime, online and off…Lockwood is a modern word witch, her writing splendid and sordid by turns.” —New York Times Book Review
“One of the most interesting writers of the past 10 years…Lockwood’s genius for irony is matched by the radiance of her reverence.” —The Atlantic
“Just the kind of book we need…The feeling one gets from reading No One Is Talking About This is that Lockwood has paid attention more closely than perhaps any other human on earth to what it’s like to be alive right now.” —Vanity Fair
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.