Book Review: “No One is Talking About This” by Patricia Lockwood

No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood

I don’t know what to say about this book.  Like Oyler, this contemporary story dances between the unreal-reality on line, and the real-unreality offline.  And kind of like Oyler, this story is actually two stories.

Stylistically, Lockwood goes the other way from Javier Cardenas (extremely long, winding sentences), and, in fact mimics the bite size scroll of social media.  The book is a long series of 1-5 line fragments.  (I read them in sequence, I’m not sure that would happen if you read them out of order.)  So that’s clever, I guess.

What I don’t really know is how much I like the story. 

One part of the story reveals a shallow obsessed person, beyond addicted to social media.  Her whole life is online, even though she doesn’t seem to enjoy it. In fact, she seems to make here living by being noticed online.

Another part of the story involves the intrusion of very real life.  This part is hard to read.  Real life is not always what we want it to be, is it?

There is a lesson here, of course.  Real life is hard, but it is authentic and full of love in unexpected places and ways.

And she wants us to realize that we need to pay attention to each other, to “give each other our minutes”—who knows how long we have?

“We don’t know how long she has—I can give her my minutes.”  Then, almost angrily, “What was I doing with them before?”” 

([1], p. 171)

Quite.

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1. Patricia Lockwood, No One is Talking About This, New York, Riverhead, 2021.

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