Author: Patricia Lockwood
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Paperback
A woman known for her viral social media posts travels the world speaking to her adoring fans, her entire existence overwhelmed by the internet - or what she terms 'the portal'. 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 increasing absurdity 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. Irreverent and sincere, poignant and delightfully profane, No One Is Talking About This is at once a love letter to the infinite scroll and a meditation on love, language and human connection from one of the most original voices of our time.
Staff Pick - Sam says…
If you're on Twitter, you'll probably know quite alot about Patricia Lockwood is. If not, you might know nothing at all. Lockwood's debut novel starts out as a reckoning with this phenomenon of being 'very online': of how language is warped and remodelled by the infinite self-reflexivity of The Feed, and the one-day subcultures this creates. The protagonist, a writer and web culture commentator is our lens, as she travels the world talking on the web and talking about the web. Then, *something happens*. The protagonist's everyday existence of writing about her life, in miniature, is interrupted by larger events that bring her back to the town of her youth, and things she thought she had left behind there. I was surprised to find that the antedote to doomscrolling was to read a novel about doomscrolling, but this novel is funny, surprising and ultimately very moving. It even made me put down my phone.