No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood: review

The first half of this book is a scalding critique of life online. I have lived there, in what the narrator calls ‘the portal’, and I recognise its memes and mores in ways that flushed my face with a combination of hilarity and humiliation as I read.

Twitter, in particular, has been a crutch to me in lonely times: freelancing, baby-wrangling, lockdown, homeschooling. It was a raucous and mildly edgy pub, with a table of people ready to bang their digital fists on the table as we enthused or railed about the same things, be they medieval manuscripts, cats, the government or Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.

In the novel, the narrator bonds passionately with a fellow panel guest purely because they are – and I thought this sentence so clever, so telling – ‘exactly, and happily, and hopelessly, the same amount of online’.

The book is written in bite-sized chunks reminiscent of Instagram captions, a structure that cleverly mirrors its content. Patricia Lockwood is searingly incisive about the dopamine hit of going viral, and about the stranglehold over her attention and time that the portal wields. We feel – as the narrator does – the emptiness of the arch barbs, the hot takes and the fake new ways of laughing, the tickling shame of the hours frittered on ephemera. However, this blistering novel also understands the heady rush of connection in a lonely time and the glee with which we gorge ourselves on the ever-scrolling fountain of content.

I’ve stepped back from Twitter. I pop my head round the door now and again in case anyone’s talking to me, and share things I’ve worked on or written. I feel relieved to have stopped scrolling for – my iPhone told me with pursed lips and clutched pearls – up to two hours a day, usually in increments of a few minutes here and there. I don’t miss the unedifying wormholes I descended, idly following an off-colour comment on a thread until I turned a corner in the labyrinth and came face to face with the digital equivalent of a ravenous minotaur: a nest of people who all agreed wholeheartedly that Donald Trump was a decent man.

Twitter made me friends, it kept me company in my loneliest times, it helped me forge countless professional connections and even once indirectly landed me a book deal, but the cost in time and concentration was too high. I fired it up in every spare second, and often – I’m ashamed to admit – even in unspare seconds when someone – usually one of my children, since I’ve spent much of the pandemic confined with them – was trying to get my attention in what Charlie Brooker memorably called ‘the meat space’.

Lockwood’s narrator is eventually dragged back from the portal into her real life by a family tragedy, one based on the author’s own experience. I don’t want to write too explicitly about the plot since I read this book knowing nothing about it, and I think this magnified its impact. This book spins on a sixpence from being a scalpel-sharp satire of social media to a devastating portrait of grief and love in a way that gives the reader whiplash, but it absolutely worked for me. I ended up ugly crying so dramatically I had to lock myself in the bathroom so I didn’t alarm the kids (though to be honest the little sociopaths probably wouldn’t have noticed, and they’ve witnessed me trying to read the Ladybird Classics Happy Prince before, so I have form.)

I feel you could read No One Is Talking About This over and over again and find new nuggets of brilliance each time. Terrible things happen to sardonically humorous people. None of us can hide from life, not even online, behind a blithe or facile or #blessed mask. I found this a wise, witty and ultimately devastating book, refreshingly unlike anything else I’ve read, and look forward to reading more from this very talented writer.

No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize and the Booker. It’s out now.

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