Patricia Lockwood was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana and raised in all the worst cities of the Midwest. She is the author of the novel No One Is Talking About This, a 2021 Booker Prize finalist, and the memoir Priestdaddy, which was named one of the ten best books of 2017 by The New York Times Book Review, and two poetry collections, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black and Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, a New York Times Notable Book. 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.
Praise for No One Is Talking About This:
Finalist for the Booker Prize
Finalist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction
Finalist for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
Winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize
Named a Best Book of 2021 by The New York Times Book Review, The
Washington Post, NPR, TIME, Vulture, Esquire, Entertainment Weekly,
BuzzFeed, PopSugar, Harper's Bazaar, LitHub and Publishers
Weekly
“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
“Lockwood is sending a bulletin from the future . . . [She] has set
out to portray not merely a mind through language, as Joyce did,
but what she calls ‘the mind,’ the molting collective consciousness
that has melded with her protagonist’s singular one . . . Lockwood
gets it right, mimicking the medium while shrewdly parodying its
ethos . . . God, is she funny! . . . Lockwood’s conceit is smart,
her prose original, hugely entertaining and witty . . . a powerful,
paradoxical observation about what digital platforms take from us .
. . Lockwood’s own writing takes on new depth and a more focussed,
richer beauty as her protagonist gets farther from the portal and
deeper into the tangible present . . . Lockwood’s writing grows
radiant . . . it is a story, simply, about love, selfless and
delighted.” —Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker
“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
“Wow. I can’t remember the last time I laughed so much reading a
book. What an inventive and startling writer. Patricia
Lockwood is a little like George Saunders in that she can write
abstract characters and still make them real, and not just clever
arrangements of words. Like Lorrie Moore she somehow crafts a
devastating story out of jokes. I’m so glad I read this. I really
think this book is remarkable.” —David Sedaris, author of
Calypso
“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
“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
“[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
“Lockwood is a modern word witch, her writing splendid and sordid
by turns . . . The chief virtue of the novel is how it transforms
all that is ugly and cheap about online culture […] into an
experience of sublimity.” —New York Times Book Review
“Lockwood’s exuberance and empathy are omnivorous, suited to any
subject, and have produced a novel that is ferocious and also
delicate, a celebration of one brief life gone too early to God.”
—Harper's Magazine
“Lockwood insistently makes the text glow . . . It’s her poetic
vision that animates the novel, embedded in yet not limited to the
internet . . . No One Is Talking About This articulates one version
of lived experience now, with more authenticity than many writers.”
—The New Republic
“Weird, slyly sophisticated humor, and a deep commitment to the
profane as a tool for revelation and critique, are hallmarks of
Lockwood’s style . . . Despite her concerns about the
individual mind’s dilution in the great tidal insanity of Online
Discourse, Lockwood is a stylist who only ever sounds like herself
. . . [she speaks] the language of the zeitgeist and [knifes] the
zeitgeist’s heart in the same gesture—her ability to win at both
humor and lacerating critique . . . a grand success.” —The
Atlantic
“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
“A stunning record of the hollows and wonders of language itself. A
lot of it, necessarily, is very funny . . . Reading [Lockwood's]
metaphors is like watching someone pull out a scalpel and cut the
cleanest line you’ve ever seen, and then in the next sentence throw
the knife over her shoulder with her eyes closed, grinning . .
. afterwards, as I returned from the book, all of our
languages seemed lit from within, stark and precious.”
—Bookforum
“Just the kind of book we need . . . The feeling one gets from
reading No One Is Talking About This is that Lockwood has paid
attention more closely than perhaps any other human on earth to
what it’s like to be alive right now.” —Vanity Fair
“[An] attention-grabbing mind-blower which toggles between
irony and sincerity, sweetness and blight . . . surprisingly
beautiful . . . Lockwood is a master of sweeping, eminently
quotable proclamations that fearlessly aim to encapsulate whole
movements and eras . . . It's a testament to her skills as a rare
writer who can navigate both sleaze and cheese, jokey tweets and
surprising earnestness, that we not only buy her character's
emotional epiphany but are moved by it. Of course,
people will be talking about this meaty book, and about
the questions Lockwood raises about what a human being is, what a
brain is, and most important, what really matters.” —NPR
“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
“[I]ngenious . . . Marvelously wicked bon mots on fame, race and
politics whiz by . . . The heroine emerges quite changed at the end
of this one. I did, too.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“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
“We need not worry about our culture as long as there are people
like Patricia Lockwood who can render the human experience out of
it. She has made a novel out of life, just as Joyce did over a
century ago.” —Chicago Tribune
“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
“Pure Lockwood—as a protagonist, and as a poet, essayist, and, now,
mesmerizing novelist. She knows that to love discordance isn’t to
justify it, but to let it gleam. She digs up every piece of
foolishness she can find in the world, dusts it off, holds it up to
the light, lets it shine, pockets it like a treasure.” —Vice
“Nothing short of astonishing . . . frequently brought me to tears.
I’ve never read anything like it.” —BuzzFeed
“Our finest chronicler of the absurd.” —GQ
“A Twitter sage and a comforting voice of the digital age,
reliably funnier, more incisive, and better able to deliver
near-perfect commentary on both the quotidian and the serious than
perhaps anyone else on the platform, Patricia Lockwood is a rare
gem of joy—offering chaotic good in an online world that typically
leans toward chaotic evil.” —Guernica
“Lockwood has established herself as a uniquely weird, irreverent
voice in contemporary literature . . . a lighthouse for original
thought.” —Jezebel
“A story of real analog human feeling, both heartbreaking and
stealthily profound.” —Entertainment Weekly
“Excellent . . . Lockwood’s language is dense and lovely as a
Cezanne painting, always . . . so clear, so tender, so radiant . .
. It is that consciousness, in the end, that Lockwood’s dense and
slippery prose evokes: not the consciousness of Twitter, but of the
world. Of being alive in the world, and experiencing love for it.”
—Vox
“Lockwood's intelligence is ablaze on the page, and there are
moments of brilliant lyricism.” — Minneapolis Star-Tribune
“I cannot believe how brilliant the novel is, except that I can,
because your work is fabulously, uncannily exquisite.” —Julia
Berick, The Paris Review
“The writing whirls . . . earnestly wistful . . . Many of
[Lockwood’s] funniest and most exuberant meditations are gleeful.”
—The Baffler
“Lockwood’s prose has a knack of grabbing the reader by the throat
. . . dazzling . . . Her cult reputation rests on the dance of her
sentences.” —The Economist
“[No One Is Talking About This] captures that boundless online
space [...] and distills it into elegant vignettes . . . Paired
with Lockwood’s skillful imagery, it’s mesmerizing to read . .
. It’s self-aware and unafraid to be ridiculous when the
moment calls for it.” —USA Today
“[As] chummy and rapturous as her writing is, [Lockwood]
doesn’t work for likes. Her aim is, in some ways, traditional: to
give voice to that which escapes sublimation, to understand the
wounds incurred by simply being alive . . . Immediate, tactile,
horny, and zoologically inclined—that’s Lockwood . . . she has
mastered the act of experience and immediate reflection, a two-step
she executes as swiftly as refreshing her browser.” —4Columns
“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"
“When Lockwood patches these memories together, is she shoring
fragments against our ruin, like an internet savvy T.S. Eliot? . .
. She’s been reminded, as readers may be when they read this
wonderful novel, of the human capacity to define ‘real life.’”
—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“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
“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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