No One Is Talking About This | Patricia Lockwood | 2021 | Book Review

No One Is Talking About This Book Review

There is a temptation, when talking about No One Is Talking About This, to call it a novel about social media and leave it at that.

The book certainly invites that description. Its protagonist spends much of her life online. She scrolls endlessly, follows arguments she barely remembers starting, watches trends rise and collapse, and becomes unexpectedly famous through the strange mechanics of internet culture.

Yet reducing the novel to a story about social media feels a bit like describing the ocean as a large puddle.

The internet is where the story begins. It is not where the story ends.

Patricia Lockwood’s 2021 novel starts as a sharp, funny, occasionally absurd portrait of life online. Then, almost without warning, it turns into something else entirely. What emerges is one of the most memorable contemporary literary fiction books of the past decade, not because of what it says about technology, but because of what it says about being human.

Some readers will admire it. Others will find it frustrating. We did a little of both.

About Patricia Lockwood

Readers who have explored other Patricia Lockwood books will already know that she rarely takes the obvious route.

She first became known for her poetry and essays, later earning widespread acclaim for her memoir Priestdaddy. Throughout her work, she has shown a remarkable ability to move between humor and seriousness without making either feel forced.

That skill is particularly important here because No One Is Talking About This asks readers to follow it through two very different worlds. One is built from memes, online arguments, and digital attention. The other is built from hospitals, family, fear, and grief.

On paper, those worlds should clash.

Somehow, Lockwood makes them belong to the same story.

What Is No One Is Talking About This About?

The novel follows an unnamed woman whose life revolves around what she calls “the portal.”

Anyone who has spent too much time online will immediately recognize it.

The portal is social media, but it is also more than that. It is every feed, every headline, every argument, every joke, every viral video, every fleeting controversy that briefly convinces us it is the most important thing in the world.

The protagonist exists inside this stream almost constantly. She builds an audience. Her posts gain attention. Invitations begin arriving. Before long, she is traveling and speaking publicly about the online world that helped create her.

At first, these sections are often hilarious. Lockwood has an extraordinary ear for internet language and the strange rhythms of online conversation. Some passages feel so familiar that they become uncomfortable.

Then the novel takes a turn.

News arrives that something has gone terribly wrong with her sister’s pregnancy. The family soon learns that the unborn child faces severe medical complications. Suddenly, the portal is no longer the center of the story.

Hospital visits replace online debates. Waiting replaces scrolling. Caregiving replaces commentary.

The shift is abrupt. We actually wondered whether the novel would be able to pull it off. In lesser hands, it probably wouldn’t have. But the contrast between the two halves ultimately becomes the book’s greatest strength.

By the time the story reaches its conclusion, the question is no longer whether the internet matters. It is whether the internet matters as much as we think it does.

More Than a Novel About the Internet

A lot of books about the internet focus on obvious targets.

Algorithms. Addiction. Misinformation. Corporate power.

Lockwood is interested in something more difficult to pin down.

What happens to people when they spend years participating in a collective conversation?

The novel returns to this question again and again. Not through lectures or political arguments, but through observation. The protagonist gradually adopts the language, assumptions, and rhythms of the online world around her. Nothing dramatic happens. There is no sudden loss of individuality.

That is precisely what makes the process unsettling.

The changes are small enough to seem harmless.

A phrase picked up here.

An opinion borrowed there.

A reaction that becomes automatic.

By the time we notice what has changed, it has already changed.

This aspect of the novel felt more relevant to us than many of the broader discussions surrounding technology and society. The internet’s influence is often discussed in terms of major events, yet most people experience it through countless tiny interactions that gradually shape the way they think.

Lockwood understands that.

Attention Has Become the Product

One idea quietly running beneath the entire novel is the attention economy.

Interestingly, Lockwood never treats attention as a buzzword. She simply shows what happens when attention becomes the most valuable resource in a system.

The portal constantly demands movement.

One day everyone is talking about a political controversy. The next day it is a celebrity. Then a meme. Then a scandal. Then something else entirely.

The pattern becomes almost hypnotic.

At several points, we found ourselves laughing at the absurdity of these cycles while also recognizing them immediately. Anyone who has spent significant time online has probably experienced the same feeling. A topic dominates conversation for days, sometimes hours, before disappearing almost completely.

What replaces it rarely seems more important.

Just newer.

That observation gives the novel much of its staying power. Several years after publication, its portrait of online attention feels even more accurate than it did at release.

What We Liked About No One Is Talking About This

What stayed with us most was not the internet commentary.

It was the novel’s willingness to question itself.

For much of the first half, the story appears to be heading toward a familiar conclusion. We expected a satire of online culture, perhaps even a condemnation of it. Lockwood never fully commits to either path.

The portal is ridiculous, but it is also meaningful.

It creates genuine relationships. It offers community. It provides opportunities.

People are not foolish for caring about it.

At the same time, the novel recognizes its limitations.

That balance is surprisingly rare.

We were also impressed by the way Lockwood handles language. Few literary fiction books pay such close attention to how people communicate. Words evolve throughout the story. Meanings shift. Entire conversations seem to develop their own grammar.

Rather than treating these changes as inherently good or bad, the novel asks what they reveal about the culture producing them.

Then there is the second half.

Without that section, the novel would probably remain an interesting intellectual exercise. With it, the story acquires emotional weight.

The scenes involving the protagonist’s niece are written with restraint and compassion. Lockwood never resorts to melodrama. In fact, some of the most powerful moments are also the quietest.

What Could Have Been Better

Our reservations have less to do with what the novel says than with what it leaves unsaid.

For much of the story, it seems as though Lockwood is building toward a discussion about balance. Can people participate in online life without becoming consumed by it? Can the internet remain useful without becoming central?

Those questions never fully disappear, but they do fade into the background.

By the end, real-world experience has largely displaced digital experience.

Emotionally, the transition works. Intellectually, it feels slightly incomplete.

Most people do not abandon the internet after a life-changing event. They continue living somewhere in between. Exploring that middle ground might have produced an even richer conclusion.

Then again, perhaps the novel’s refusal to provide neat answers is part of the point.

We went back and forth on that question several times after finishing the book.

Quotes That Stayed With Us

Some novels produce memorable scenes. Others produce memorable ideas. This one manages both.

It was a mistake to believe that other people were not living as deeply as you were. Besides, you were not even living that deeply.

Perhaps the novel’s sharpest observation about perspective and self-importance.

I was just thinking that you and I…have seen very different memes in our lives.

Funny, absurd, and oddly revealing.

The future of intelligence must be about search, while the future of ignorance must be about the inability to evaluate information.

A line that feels increasingly relevant every year.

Every day their attention must turn, like the shine on a school of fish, all at once, toward a new person to hate. Sometimes the subject was a war criminal, but other times it was someone who made a heinous substitution in guacamole.

No quote better captures the strange volatility of collective online attention.

Final Thoughts

Weeks after finishing No One Is Talking About This, what we remembered was not a particular joke, meme, or online argument.

It was the baby.

For a novel that begins so firmly rooted in internet culture, that is a remarkable achievement.

The portal dominates the first half of the book because the protagonist believes it dominates life itself. By the end, Lockwood gently but firmly challenges that assumption. The internet can explain a great deal about modern existence. It can connect people across continents. It can create communities that would never otherwise exist.

What it cannot do is replace the experiences that matter most.

That realization gives the novel its emotional force.

Readers looking for books about internet culture or digital age books that explore technology and society will find plenty to think about here. Those searching for a story about grief and loss may be surprised by how deeply the second half resonates.

Either way, this is not a novel that disappears once the final page is turned.