This fear seems to preoccupy a particular type of novelist working today - awareness of possible self-embarrassment online, and a carefully cultivated online identity, is tantamount to an investment in one’s future. It is also in this first section that the vital anxiety of Lockwood’s arises again and again: the fear that people may one day look back at us and laugh at the fools we made of ourselves online. If this section of the novel sounds like a standard social media personality’s Twitter feed - rife with thoughts and posturing, the tics and habits of the online world, and explorations of the idea of continuous content alongside the worries (and realization) that others are living just as complex and online lives as we are - then that’s because it is.
It even goes all the way to unlikely, but still very present, examples of AAVE used in the main character’s Thanksgiving day texts with a family member as a way to demonstrate co-opting language. The first section of the novel more closely resembles a Twitter feed that ranges in topics from the over-usage of words like ‘toxic’ or ‘normalize’, to the origins of the Unabomber, to imagined Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. In Lockwood’s first venture into fiction following two poetry collections and an acclaimed memoir ( Priestdaddy), she enters a conversation about the Internet that continuously occurs online and in reality and includes academics and authors alike. This line of inquiry into the divide between the two worlds (if it exists) is present throughout. Other things slipped down, and the fast river of the mind closed over them so she forgot they had been ubiquitous.”Īlternating between these two forms of language is a tenuous balancing act, in other words. Early in the book, Lockwood compares herself to a new species of frog covered in warts, before writing:
This balancing act swings back and forth between the language of the Internet, and the language we’ve come to expect from traditional Western novels. She alternates between “meatspace” (as disgusting as that word is) and her equally engrossing online life.
In Patricia Lockwood’s debut novel, No One is Talking About This, there is a line after the birth of her sister’s child which highlights the balancing act attempted in this book: “It was a marvel how cleanly and completely this lifted her out of the stream of regular life.” Lockwood’s exquisite writing aims to show how the lines have blurred between online and real life, and how difficult it can be to discern between the two.
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