Book review: No One is Talking About This – Patricia Lockwood

I have put off this review until today. I can’t put it off any longer. But from the outset I accept there is just no way I can do this incredible book justice but equally no way I am not going to review it.

When I read Priestdaddy two years ago, I knew I had found a writer who I would read for the rest of my life. As a it was memoir was biting, edgy funny and raw. The talent of Lockwood to pull you into this family and push at all your boundaries was just extraordinary and I instantly wanted more. So when I knew this novel was on the horizon I was delighted to managed to obtain a proof. And it was perfection all over again.

This is a story told in bites; delicious, sharp, salty bites by an unnamed but vivid narrator. It is a tale of two halves, two perspectives and from two very different places and spaces.

Our narrator lives her life on and through the ‘portal’, a social media platform which seems to be a thinly disguised Twitter. She is an internet sensation, regularly travelling the globe to talk about the internet and her life within it. Set in the age of Trump, we see how life online is all consuming, all pervading and impossible to both quantify and escape. There is a air of unreality to the first half, which shocks even more when we start to recognise that it is all based on and in crazy truth.

Like all great writing with a nod to the dystopian, there nothing that Lockwood explores that isn’t already happening. From cancel culture, to online shaming, to the every changing goal posts of judgement and perceived morality, Lockwood lays it all bare. And makes us all complicit.

And then life gets real. Away from the portal the narrator’s sister is pregnant. Her unborn child has a rare genetic defect and life is scary, uncertain and totally consuming. Real life has broken in and suddenly the heated and theoretical discussion of women’s reproductive rights in right wing America isn’t a hashtag, or a thread to hang your buzz words on. It’s real. And so is life, and love and grief.

Throughout this novel the prose is like poetry , challenging, biting and evocative. It is one of those rare and beautiful books where each line is perfectly constructed . Where each sentence, each phrases seem to be competing with the next, whilst at the same time complimenting it and holding it up.

This is a novel you could read a thousand times and find something different each time. In fact, scrap that, you could probably read just a single page, a paragraph, even a line a thousand times and find something new each time. You will read this book with your eyes wide open and your brain screaming, “Pay Attention!”

This is a novel both alive with disconnect and stark, alarming reality; both present at the same time and both demanding your attention. It explores how true connection if found, made and sustained in this age where we believe we more connected than ever before. It is about what matters and what doesn’t, and how the two seem to have merged, how the digital and actual seem to have meshed into one, each feeding the other. And it’s about the extremes that are needed to break this spell

Words can’t express this importance of this book. It needs to absorbed, mere reading won’t do.

Rachel x