No One is Talking About This: social media, older millennials and autofiction
As I write this, the shortlist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist has just been announced and this, Patricia Lockwood’s first novel, has just made the cut.
And honestly, I’m furious about it.
I hated this book. I (begrudingly) gave it one star, and I only finished it because it was out BookClubbers pick for April.
‘No One is Talking About This’ is about a women who lives in social media. It rules her life and is her career. And then she gets a message from her mom which throws her back into the realest of real life and causes her to reflect on life on and off of the internet.
Sounds pretty interesting, right?
Not so much.
I listened to the audiobook of this novel and it’s a bit dazzling and overwhelming in very much the same way as the Internet is, it’s a lot of information very quickly, and I’m not entirely sure that it’s a particularly nice reading experience. The writing feels like the internet; with rapid-fire vignettes of things to pay attention to, to consider, to laugh at, to use as a way of hiding from reality, as a type of hyper reality. Like scrolling through Twitter or Instagram, and the actual content felt exactly like that: a regurgitation of old memes and online phenomenons.
There’s no story, no real character, it’s just aimless stream of consciousness that brings up old internet culture. There’s no substance or point to it. It felt empty and an attempt to make a searing, intellectual point that for me really fell flat.
And then it changes gears in a baffling way.
The story switches to the character (who I’m pretty sure is unnamed throughout) heading home to her family for the birth of her niece. I don’t want to spoil it, but it’s a tragic story and it feels like a completed different novel. This is absolutely a novel of two parts and though I understand that Lockwood was purposefully drawing that line between online life and ‘real’ life, it didn’t work for me.
The tone, the style, the genre, the everything felt different and wholey unconnected. Then we get to the afterword and it suggests that the second half of the book is actual based on truth. I think that officially ‘No One is Talking About This’ is autofiction, but I’d be more inclined to call it a mess. I think that the second half was stronger in terms of writing and storytelling, but I wasn’t emotionally invested in what is an emotional story because the alienating first half and then the sudden switch.
Sarah and I did a whole liveshow discussing this novel on Instagram as part of the book club which you can watch below if you fancy it:
It also brought up the issue for me of using a dying child as fodder for your novel, as part of career, your ‘art’. It sits in the same realm as children being displayed on YouTube and social media as part of influencers and YouTubers careers and it makes me incredibly uncomfortable. That felt like the final straw for me and I finished it in an a bad mood and with a bad taste in my mouth.
And yet, it’s been shortlisted for the Women’s Prize. The world is a crazy place.
Have you read this? What did you think?
You can purchase ‘No One is Talking About This’ via our Bookshop.org affiliate link.
Written by Sophie
