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this is an edited version of a public post on flover. you can hear me read this here. sharable version on substack.

The first book we read for the Experiments in Experience nonfiction class last semester was Patricia Lockwood’s 2021 novel No One Is Talking About This, which is about grief, performance, social media fame, the ways in which the Internet has transformed communication and our abilities to impact others around the world, and what happens when our online and offline worlds converge.

It’s split into two parts, the first of which resembles Twitter with its one-liners and short passages, its disparate ideas and absurd musings and sharp observations written by the unnamed female protagonist, who went viral prior to the events of the novel by asking, “Can a dog be twins?” The latter portion is prose-heavy: longer paragraphs and fleshed-out thoughts, as the protagonist tries to pivot from the unserious to grapple with not only the horrors of “the portal” in her phone, but also a tragedy impacting her family. She never quite transcends what Mark O’Connell for The Guardian calls “irony poisoning”, but we get to see her complex human messiness, once she grounds herself in the offline world and interacts with people in person, in a way that feels “authentic”, as in unmediated by a screen and online persona. As in not commodified or presented for public consumption. As in raw. As in real.

I loved this book. It wasn’t a quick read, but I flew through the pages, underlining and adding margin notes and trying hard not to laugh loudly on a crowded weekend train. I have a shortlist of works I turn to when most in need of immediate creative inspiration and human reassurance that my artmaking is valuable and necessary and that, yes, I should be where I am right now, writing and experimenting the way I have been. Works to emulate, works that strip me down to my bones. As soon as I was finished reading No One Is Talking About This, it joined the list.

In my class, this glowing response was a minority opinion. A fragment of a remark made during one discussion that stuck with me was, “If this is where literature is going, then… [grimace]”
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