TW: Infant loss

What does it feel like to live in the internet? Patricia Lockwood’s new novel puts it on paper. In No One is Talking About This, we find an unnamed protagonist who is so absorbed in “the portal” that her husband tells her she looks dead as she’s scrolling, yet she knows this is the time when she feels most alive. 

The first half of the book feels like an internet binge, like a deep dive, like a long scroll. The protagonist watches her tweets go viral, makes jokes. She pontificates on things like how the word “toxic” has now gotten famous and can’t go back to being a regular word, or how the supermoon-of-the-month looks “like a very thicc snack.” 

“YOU HAVE A NEW MEMORY,” the protagonist’s phone announces. And this is how it is--the mind no longer lives in the brain, but in the chip. Alert me of what I remember next, tiny phone “in my hand that is an eye”!

“There is still a real life to be lived, there are still real things to be done,” the protagonist thinks, flitting over an experience where she helped a friend wash possum blood from her hands (was there a car accident? Something more sinister? In the pace of things, we never find out). But then the possum isn’t dead after all--gone from the yard in the morning. We’re left wondering: Was the blood real? Is any of this real? Then we quickly move on to Arnold Schwarzenegger, to viral memes of interracial friendship.

And halfway through the book, there is a turn. The protagonist’s sister, who is pregnant, finds out very late in her pregnancy that the baby has Proteus syndrome and, should she survive birth, will almost certainly not survive much longer than that. The protagonist is plunged into the real world, perhaps for the first time. 

The baby is born, and miraculously lives, but won’t for long. As the protagonist and her sister are subsumed into the baby’s world, the book becomes a profound memorial to a life fully lived in the senses--suddenly, the only thing important is the immediate here and now. The baby cannot see, but expresses delight at voices, at kisses from her family. She hears the rain. She touches a blue koosh ball, a bright red pompom. She coos. 

Where do we live, and what do we care about? Maybe the answer is where we spend our time, and where we spend our time is on the internet. When a child (or a family member, or you, or anyone close to you) is sick, and you are pulled from your regular haze of days into a caregiving role, it shakes you to the core as you realize how much pettiness there was in your life before. An argument of something dumb. The hours you spent watching TikTok instead of being engaged and present. But “the portal” holds comfort, too. 

If you have experienced the loss of a child, or really any loss, this book completely captures what it feels like. The temporary feeling of everything. How fragmented it all still is. How of-the-world. Lockwood describes the protagonist’s time with the baby as “those boiled-clear mornings,” a phrase I got stuck on, reading it over and over again and marveling at its accuracy. We tend to tell stories about our lives in an old kind of way--like a short story. A narrative arc. Here is the beginning, here is the middle, here is the end. Here’s what I learned. Here is the moral. Lockwood’s novel makes us consider that our reality might actually be much more fragmented. Our attention spans are shorter. But also, like the baby, we live in this sensory experience. We are here only briefly. We are here in the time of Marlon Brando’s Wikipedia page. We are here to meet a dog. We are here to try cake, to be sung to, to open our very wide eyes. 

It’s impossible to forget, as you read this novel, that Patricia Lockwood is first a poet. But no more so than when the protagonist lists all of the things she wants the baby to know. A distillation of real life in one fragment: 

The things she wanted the baby to know seemed small, so small. How it felt to go to a grocery store on vacation; to wake at three a.m. and run your whole life through your fingertips; first library card; new lipstick; a toe going numb for two months because you wore borrowed shoes to a friend’s wedding; Thursday; October; “She’s Like the Wind” in a dentist’s office; driver’s license picture where you look like a killer; getting your bathing suit back on after you go to the bathroom; touching a cymbal for sound and then touching it again for silence...

The book isn’t instructive--there’s not an argument, really, about whether it is better to live in the portal or in the real world. They are tightly intertwined, and we can’t abandon the internet entirely. It is, after all, the language we now speak. 

Note: The link included in this blog to Old Town Books is not an affiliate link.

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