Patricia Lockwood was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana and raised in all the worst cities of the Midwest. She is the author of two poetry collections, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black and Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, a New York Times Notable Book, and the memoir Priestdaddy, which was named one of the ten best books of 2017 by The New York Times Book Review. Lockwood's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and the London Review of Books, where she is a contributing editor.
Advance praise for No One Is Talking About This Named a
"Most Anticipated Book of 2021" by Harper's Bazaar,
Vulture, O, the Oprah Magazine, Parade,
Refinery29, Good Housekeeping, The Guardian,
WIRED, USA Today, Buzzfeed, Esquire,
AV Club, and more!
"One of the most incisive observers of the spectacle of digital
discourse . . . Lockwood is a sharp and often funny social critic.
She writes wisely of the emotionally labile landscape of the
internet . . . many of her images are evocative and often beautiful
. . . More inventive than lapidary, Ms. Lockwood's style is artful
without being precious . . . What begins as an ironical story about
irony becomes an intimate and moving portrait of love and grief. In
this way, a novel that had been toying with the digital surface of
modern life finds the tender heart pumping away beneath it all."
--Emily Bobrow, The Wall Street Journal "Reading Patricia
Lockwood raises questions. Questions such as, How can a person
understand both herself and the world with such clarity? How does a
person experience things so intensely and express them so
buoyantly? Am I laughing or am I crying? Lockwood's first
novel is as crystalline, witty, and brain-shredding as her poetry
and criticism." --Molly Young, Vulture "[Lockwood is] a
master of startling concision when highlighting the absurdities
we've grown too lazy to notice . . . It's a vertiginous experience,
gorgeously rendered but utterly devastating. I rattled around the
house for days afterwards, shattered but grateful for the reminder
that the ephemeral world we've constructed online is a shadow
compared to the pain and affection we're blessed to experience in
real life." --Ron Charles, The Washington Post "[No One
Is Talking About This] it is an arch descendant of Austen's
socio-literary style . . . [Lockwood] writes brilliantly and
bitingly--the temptation is just to keep on quoting her." --Clair
Wills, The New York Review of Books "Explores the kind of tumult
and grief that almost defies language as well as the frightening
uniformity of the online herds." --The New York Times "Never has
the experience of being Extremely Online been more viscerally
rendered than in No One Is Talking About This, Lockwood's
astonishing novel . . . [that] locates both the profane and the
profound in how we live online. No One Is Talking About This will
frighten you, implicate you, and scrape your guts out, in the best
way possible." --Esquire
"Deeply felt . . . dazzling, devastatingly funny and sharply
observed . . . there's a visceral sense of the genuine feeling
underlying the performance--unironic emotion, raw and
unself-conscious . . . the bright tang of joy and grief and
hilarity in Lockwood's writing overwhelms." --Huffington Post
"Lockwood conveys what the internet does to the human mind better
than any other working writer today . . . [She's] an incredibly
funny and insightful writer, so I was expecting No One Is Talking
About This to be witty and wise. What I wasn't expecting was how
moving it would be. This is a special book." --WIRED
"[A]stute and studded with metaphors of jolting perfection . . .
what feels most original in No One Is Talking About This is
Lockwood's depiction of the shaping pressure of social media on the
self . . . frequently radiant . . . the main character doesn't
repudiate the internet, exactly. She travels beyond the edge of
something she had once believed was infinite." --Slate "Gives
you the sense of scrolling through a very smart, very online
person's feed. Many of the bits kill . . . an adrenaline-filled,
whipsawing first half . . . passages of sublime emotional power . .
. gives us the twitchy pleasures of social media while taking
advantage of the ethical and formal demands of the novel."
--The Boston Globe "Lockwood's talent for drawing life with
words defies description; in fact, attempts at description feel
embarrassing and redundant--just immerse yourself in the book and
then, when you're ready to talk, call me and have a glass of wine
in hand! Lockwood is a poet, and her narrative storytelling is
imbued with the same sense of sacredness of certain poems and songs
. . . I laughed hard and I cried hard." --Glamour "Brings the
chaos and comedy of social media to print . . . With a narrative
perspective shift akin to The Sound and the Fury . . . the
contrast of the novel is meant to speak for itself by presenting
two alternate styles of living, neither of them comfortable, but
one infinitely more human than the other." --Seattle Times
"A glowing object that somehow replicates and beautifies the
experience of being on the internet...profoundly enjoyable.
Lockwood reminds me a lot of Nabokov -- less in style than in
attitude, one of extraordinary receptivity to the gifts, sorrows,
and bloopers of existence. What Lockwood lacks in Nabokov's
fastidiousness she makes up for in butt jokes." --Vulture, Molly
Young, Read Like the Wind "Meta yet relatable and sharp, you will
be talking about No One Is Talking About This." --Marie
Claire, Best Fiction Out in 2021 "Unlike some cautionary tales that
take an overly simplistic view of social media use as inherently
'bad' or narcissistic, Lockwood grapples with its nuances from the
viewpoint of someone who deeply understands its specific language
and community. Teasing out the bizarre nature of a life performed
on Twitter with comedy and startling incisiveness, readers will
surely be talking about Lockwood's No One Is Talking About
This for years to come . . . Will make you laugh, cry, and then
reconsider your relationship with the Twitter-verse." --PopSugar "A
glory . . . From one of our most distinctive voices about life
lived online, Patricia Lockwood's latest reads like scrolling
through bursts of fine-tuned hilarity, lyricism, and grief. A
staggeringly original and moving debut novel." --Vulture Picks "No
writer captures the heartbreaking absurdity of modern life better."
--Chicago Review of Books "[G]loriously weird to the bone . . .
Patricia Lockwood captures what it means to struggle with your
identity and place in the world in a way that's tender, surreal,
and infinitely captivating." --Apartment Therapy "This novel is
unlike any you've ever read; it will give you a great deal to think
about and it will give you great pause." --Shondaland "You won't
know the true meaning of genre-defying until you've read Lockwood's
latest work: We'll describe the plot as 'a social media influencer
is confronted with several existential crises' but be warned that
it's so much more than that." --Entertainment Weekly "[A]
perfect cultural artifact for these absurd and upsetting times."
--Thrillist
"Everyone is bound to be talking about this first novel from
Patricia Lockwood." --Harper's Bazaar "Genre-bending and
entirely original." --Parade "Calling all people who are
Extremely Online: You need to read this book . . . It's a must-read
for anyone who finds themselves falling into the endless scroll
more than they'd like. (So, basically, all of us.)" --Hello
Giggles "Lockwood is crafty and savvy with a bite. She knows how to
balance pushing boundaries while letting readers feel cozy even if
they don't realize why they feel that way." --Debutiful "One
of the most exciting writers these days is also one of the most
Online, as longtime fans of Patricia Lockwood all agree . . . Like
the internet itself, what follows is as ecstatically humorous as it
is heartbreakingly sad." --The Millions
"Rare is the writer who can adequately capture the strange duality
of life in the age of social media, a reality in which the visceral
and virtual are constantly colliding. But then, Patricia Lockwood
is a rare writer; one whose work--whether a poem, memoir, or
tweet--distills the essence of the extremely profane and reverent
all at once . . . [Lockwood has an] ability to reflect what is so
terribly funny and so terribly tragic about this particular moment
in time." --Refinery29 "This is as close as I've ever seen a
book get to recreating the way the internet--mindless absurdity,
stuff about butts, random profundity--feels. The second section,
however, takes a turn, and you realize that recreating all that
inanity had a point: to be held up against real, terrible,
heartrending life." --Lit Hub "A fast and furious debut novel
about being embedded deep in the digital world." --The
Guardian "Strange and intimately familiar. It's bizarre, oddly
funny, at times piercing and absolutely a must-read for all of us
social media users." --Good Housekeeping "Patricia Lockwood
is the kind of writer that you stop and read immediately whenever
she publishes something new . . . Her supreme intelligence and
wildly imaginative, offbeat sense of humor always comes to the
fore. That is why readers may consider putting in their days off
now, as Lockwood publishes her first novel in mid-February . . .
Lockwood explores, as only she can, what it feels like to be
extremely online. What may be even more remarkable than the novel's
humor and insight is just how much heart it has, too." --AV Club
"A social media novel unlike anything you've ever read before."
--BookPage "Lockwood's debut novel comes packed with the humor,
bawdiness, and lyrical insight that buoyed her memoir Priestdaddy .
. . In the book's shimmering second half, the internet jokes
continue between the sisters as a means of coping with uncertainty,
and resonate with the theme of life's ephemerality vs. the
internet's infinitude. Throughout, a fragmented style captures and
sometimes elevates a series of text messages and memes amid the
meditations on family . . . This mighty novel screams with laughter
just as it wallops with grief." --Publishers Weekly
(starred review) "An insightful--frequently funny, often
devastating--meditation on human existence online and off."
--Kirkus (starred review) "Provocative, addictive . .
. With unfettered, imagistic language, Lockwood conjures both a
digital life that's easily fallen into, and the sorts of love and
grief that can make it all fall away." --Booklist
(starred review) "Reading Patricia Lockwood feels like looking
through a kaleidoscope built by a mischievous sorcerer--the world
is suddenly rearranged in fragments that are cosmic, wondrous,
humiliating, and profane. No One Is Talking About This is a
furiously original novel, alive and unstable; the book builds to a
reminder of how devastation and connection produce each other,
endlessly and surprisingly, both on the internet and in human
places that our shared digital consciousness can never reach."
--Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror "I really admire and
love this book. Patricia Lockwood is a completely singular talent
and this is her best, funniest, weirdest, most affecting work yet."
--Sally Rooney, author of Normal People and Conversations
with Friends "Witty and at times genuinely moving . . . Lockwood is
a phenomenal writer who is a keen observer of the strangeness of
online culture and the fragility of the human heart." --Roxane
Gay, author of Not That Bad "Patricia Lockwood is a genius. No
one else writes about the absurdism of internet culture with such
mischief, affection, and awe. This novel cracked me up and then
moved me to tears. I won't be able to stop thinking about it for a
long time." --Leigh Stein, author of Self Care "Lockwood's
book got its hooks into me inside of two pages. Her observations
about the pace and timbre and temperature and specific toxic weight
of social media are so incisive, so perfectly-pitched, that they're
like being shown portrait after portrait of oneself. In the second
half of the book, when the world of hopes and genes and
expectations pierces the rich wall of digital static, the effect is
vertiginous, the pain profound, the tenderness of the family
responding to crisis so real and so vivid that we feel present in
the rooms with them as they learn the parameters of their grief.
And not just grief, which is another of this book's great gifts.
Lockwood saves her keenest, her best language for writing about the
world of caring for a child with a debilitating genetic condition,
the vocabulary of care, harder to describe than the Internet by
half. This novel is a blessing, a gift, a difficult and great thing
in the world." --John
Darnielle
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