About the Author

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.

Reviews

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