No One Is Talking About This
"From "a formidably gifted writer" (The New York Times Book Review), a book that asks: Is there life after the internet? As this urgent, genre-defying book opens, a woman who has recently been elevated to prominence for her social media posts travels around the world to meet her adoring fans. She is overwhelmed by navigating the new language and etiquette of what she terms "the portal," where she grapples with an unshakable conviction that a vast chorus of voices is now dictating her thoughts. When existential threats--from climate change and economic precariousness to the rise of an unnamed dictator and an epidemic of loneliness--begin to loom, she posts her way deeper into the portal's void. An avalanche of images, details, and references accumulate to form a landscape that is post-sense, post-irony, post-everything. "Are we in hell?" the people of the portal ask themselves. "Are we all just going to keep doing this until we die?" Suddenly, two texts from her mother pierce the fray: "Something has gone wrong," and "How soon can you get here?" As real life and its stakes collide with the increasingly absurd antics of the portal, the woman confronts a world that seems to contain bo
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about No One Is Talking About This
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A woman known online for one viral tweet lives mostly inside the portal, the internet. A phone call from her mother yanks her home, where her sister is having a baby with a serious medical diagnosis.
Yes. No One Is Talking About This was shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize and won the Dylan Thomas Prize. It was Patricia Lockwood's debut novel after a poetry and memoir career.
Yes, in part. The first half of the novel chronicles online life on a thinly disguised Twitter; the second half pivots sharply to a family medical crisis. The contrast between the two halves is central to the novel's argument.
No One Is Talking About This is 224 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, No One Is Talking About This takes most readers 3 to 5 hours to finish.
No One Is Talking About This is a standalone novel by an unknown author, not part of a series.
No One Is Talking About This is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.