This is a messy book. The first half is written in snippets, vignettes referring to random online phenomena, viral tweets and memes in a sort of stream of consciousness kinda way. It's about people who live online and that is most of their reality.

This part was seriously boring, even though the author can clearly write well, and there is an occasional great paragraph. I just know too many women who write similar things in a similar manner and are much better at connecting emotionally to the reader, so this left me cold.

The second part focuses on the "real life" events that are in complete contrast with the beginning of this book. It deals with some heavy topics, politics, law, grief... It was a lot more interesting and better written, but it never took off. The chopped-up structure didn't help.
As a result, although I really felt some parts, I couldn't really connect to this as a whole.

I wish I loved this more. I wish the second half started sooner in this book and that I could get into the mind of the narrator more.

But, as it is, it was very underwhelming. ( )

It's easier for me to respect than love a novel written in the fragmentary style, to say "Yes, I see what you did there, well done, it's not really for me, though". No One Is Talking About This at least has a formal reason for being written this way, even arguably a necessary one, being about the experience of being extremely online, but even more specifically being extremely online on Twitter, or "the portal" as Lockwood's narrator calls it, and this is how the portal writes. It is also however about the experience of having the ultimately inescapable reality of human bodies and sickness suddenly jerk you out of your previous life, even when that life is the disembodied mind inside the portal, and seeing that life continue on in its great stream while you are busy with something else, and when you lift your head and look over at it, you realize that you are now an outsider viewing it through a film of difference and alienation rather than an integrated participant.

Why be a part of the portal in the first place? Why, when what goes on in it, your contributions in it, fly by and are gone in nearly a blink. "Already it was becoming impossible to explain things she had done even the year before, why she had spent hypnotized hours of her life, say, photoshopping bags of frozen peas into pictures of historical atrocities, posting OH YES HUNNY in response to old images of Stalin, why whenever she liked anything especially, she said she was going to 'chug it with her ass.' Already it was impossible to explain these things."

Personally I have no idea why people on Twitter photoshopped bags of frozen peas into pictures of historical atrocities or posted OH YES HUNNY to pictures of Stalin, but if even core participants have trouble explaining why they did it a short time later, it can't be very important, really. And so I think it's not important if readers of this novel know the memes Lockwood is referencing or not. It might be a fun sort of parlor game, but that's all.

The important thing to know is why the character is immersing herself into the portal, and what it is doing to her, rather than the frankly irrelevant details of what flies by in the portal. She says, "it was a place where she would always choose the right side, where the failure was in history and not herself, where she did not read the wrong writers, was not seized with surges of enthusiasm for the wrong leaders, did not eat the wrong animals... she knew how it all turned out... she floated as the head at the top of it and saw everything, everything, backward, backward, and turned away in fright from her own bright day."

So we get a hint that the portal offers self-esteem and a sense of belonging to a favored tribe, psychological benefits that humans seem designed to chase. It offers certainty and a way to avoid the scary unknown. It also becomes a self-erasing addiction. "You have a totally dead look on your face," her husband tells her as she's doing something or other in the portal. She thinks, "Gradually it had become the place where we sounded like each other, through some erosion of wind or water on a self not nearly as firm as stone." And it takes on a darker cast over time. People - Russians, capitalists, our own ambitious political leaders - exploit it to manipulate us. There's a lust to find transgressors and righteously hound and shun them: "Callout culture! Were things rapidly approaching the point where even you would be seen as bad?"

"Something has gone wrong," her mother texts her. But she's not referencing the portal. The character's sister has had a terrible revelation about her pregnancy. A rare and fatal genetic abnormality in the baby has been discovered. Her sister's life is in danger. She is suddenly and without warning jerked out of her previous life, undone by the reality of these fragile bodies we inhabit outside of the portal. Lockwood writes,

She fell heavily out of the broad warm us, out of the story that had seemed, up till the very last minute, to require her perpetual co-writing. Oh, she thought hazily, falling rain-wise like Alice, finding tucked under her arm the bag of peas she once photoshopped into pictures of historical atrocities, oh, have I been wasting my time?

She finds that being surrounded by and participating in her family's pain rather than living so greatly inside the portal reintroduces her to herself: "the previous unshakable conviction that someone else was writing the inside of her head was gone." As ever, illness and death have a great way of shifting one's perception of the world, one does not have to be extremely online to experience this fact of life, it's just one more way of being that has to bow before something greater. New, but ultimately not different in this respect, anyone can identify with this passage where the character looks at her previous life, before the Great Encounter:

Through the membrane of a white hospital wall she could feel the thump of the life that went on without her, the hugeness of the arguments about whether you could say the word retard on a podcast. She laid her hand against the white wall and the heart beat, strong and striding, even healthy. But she was no longer in that body.

So the novel takes a turn towards the universal as Life asserts itself over life. It's not sentimental, Lockwood is far too strong of a writer to get trapped in clichés and sentiment only, rather we see the characters doing the best they can to live out love with each other and in the baby's short life among the difficulties and realities that lie in wait. The character wonders if this experience will change her, fill her with more love and kindness towards her fellow humans. On an airplane, she feels the world calling her back, and the rainbow that follows the plane's path just might offer an answer.

Love to you, whether you find yourself in the portal or elsewhere. ( )

Not having a clue about the Twitter world, I was a little lost in the first half of the book. I did catch references to current events and the humor around them, but many references were lost on me. Nevertheless, I found myself laughing frequently while realizing there is a whole other world out there that I'm missing. The second half of the book was another story entirely, a chronicle of a pregnancy gone horribly wrong because of a genetic mistake in the fetus. This was a heart wrenching account of young parents caring for a doomed child. The contrast between the virtual digital existence of "living" in a self controlled ether and the real life inescapable existence of living in the forever NOW of heartbreak is the reason for this book. The author navigates this brilliantly. Kudos. ( )

I only have it about 25 pages, but it is written as if the the author wants to recreate the experience of scrolling social media. I was impatient for a narrative I could or would want to follow. Not for me.

I really did not expect to like this but I couldn't put it down. The writing is sharp and observant. I enjoyed the interplay of the two parts of the book (and suspect I would have lost interest if the whole book had the super-aware twitter-addicted tone of the first part.) Maybe I do want to read [b:Priestdaddy|31920820|Priestdaddy|Patricia Lockwood|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1481223015l/31920820._SY75_.jpg|52573451]?? ( )