patricia lockwood nobody is talking about this

Though Lockwood aimed to write a book about a very specific, 2010s iteration of the internet, she wanted to create a story that people many years in the future could still read. But it also feels like just the kind of book we need nearly a year into a pandemic that has confined many of us to our homes and sent hundreds of thousands to the hospital. Lockwood first conceived of the book, which explores online existence and a medical crisis in 208 gleaming pages, in 2017. No One Is Talking About This takes place partly very inside the internet-or the “portal,” as the book euphemistically terms it-and partly very outside it. Perhaps Lockwood’s debut novel is a salve for our online wounds, if the kind of medicine that hurts so you know it’s working. But being stung by our main source of information is a tempting metaphor for the way it’s felt to experience, refracted through our phones, a long pandemic year of historic racial-justice protests, an election, and an insurrection. The internet does not make most of us feel like our hands are literally bees. One of those is peripheral neuropathy she rations her phone and laptop use to avoid the buzzing, burning feeling that comes from too much scrolling. The 38-year-old author contracted COVID in March and, like an unknown but seemingly significant number of others, has experienced an array of mysterious symptoms even months after her initial illness.

These days, the internet does cause Lockwood real suffering when she spends too much time online, her hands “burst into bees,” she told me over Zoom in January. She’s referring to Thom Yorke, but she might just as easily be talking about her own creator.

“Certain people were born with the internet inside them and suffered greatly from it,” notes the narrator of Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This, out February 16 from Riverhead.

Patricia lockwood nobody is talking about this