Talking About No One is Talking About This

Or: some notes on can a dog be twins

I’ve recently decided the test of a healthy relationship with social media and the internet is not only how much you use those entities, not how much screen time you have per day—but also how much you think about them when you’re not using them. It’s having trouble eating a nice brunch without thinking that you need to take a photograph of it and show it to everyone you know. It’s thinking about how you can’t wait to take your opinion and shout it into the void. It’s thinking in memes, it’s classifying the people you know into whether or not they liked your latest post, it’s not knowing where you end and the rest of it begins. It’s forgetting that you’re allowed not to know the news, not to know the thing everyone is angry about today. It’s having a meaningful experience in real life and then wondering how you’re going to tell everyone about it through the medias. 

The unnamed protagonist of Patricia Lookwood’s No One is Talking About This has the least healthy relationship with social media and the internet of anyone I’ve seen depicted in literature. It’s the least healthy obsession with being online that I’ve seen not online. And this is true of the protagonist throughout from the beginning of the book to the end. She’s on a journey, but her journey never cures her internet poisoning. What it does is gets her to start posting less while remaining constantly thinking about and in terms of what she calls the portal. 

Lots of people are talking about this.

No One is Talking About This is a good book, and a sad book, and a quick book, and an exhausting book. The first half of it is about one woman’s obsession with the internet. The second half is also about a baby dying, as viewed by a woman whose obsession with the internet has been interrupted by this baby’s slow death. 

We don’t know which social media platforms in particular the protagonist is addicted to. We don’t know her name, or the names of her family members. The only names in this are those of television shows and celebrities. Wikipedia and Harambe. All social media is referred to as “the portal.” Donald Trump is referred to as “the dictator.” The dying baby is referred to as “the baby”.

I could see this book being one of those that gets studied in school fifty years from now. It’s a snapshot in time, a glimpse into how people used the internet during a particular moment. Although the moment depicted already seems forgotten. It’s a pre-pandemic novel, cluttered with things that don’t quite work that way anymore and memes that I don’t remember, if they happened at all. Someone reading this twenty years from now will need an annotated guide to understand the references, the memes, Harambe and binch and a baby eaten by an alligator. And I think it’ll remain for posterity because of exactly that. People will look to this book to understand the moment immediately before the pandemic crashed down on us, the way people’s brains worked. 

Some of this, I don’t know if it’s real or if she made it up for the book. There’s a story about ghosts that everyone is talking about. Is she describing Cat Person as a ghost story or did she make up a viral ghost story or was there a viral ghost story I don’t remember? The book is full of these moments. You wonder how much it really happened, and it worries you that it happened a lot like she says it did.

One thing I kept thinking as I read this book: the writer of this has a really serious internet addiction. I told my wife this and she said “that’s the point” and I realized “yeah, you’re right,” but as it went I struggled to know the difference between the writer’s view on the world and the narrator’s view. Did the writer know, while writing, that not everyone is like the people in this story? Did she write this as a satire or a reflection? Does she know that most people don’t have these online addictions this bad, or that if they do have these addictions this bad, they might need real help? Is she trying to create an implausible protagonist with a murky career and a family that could never exist of internet-addicted tragic figures unable to look at death without speaking of Harambe? Or does she think that is what people are really like? Or, making me more anxious, more frightened as I read this book, is that what people really are like now? Is this an exact look at our lives? Am I one of these people? If I tweeted a reference to the book immediately after finishing it—and I did—then am I as disturbed as the characters in this book?

The saddest part of this book is the Acknowledgements, when you realize all of this might have been true. There was a real baby. Her niece. These people, these scenes, really happened, although I assume she added in many of the internet addiction elements, the memes and so on—but I discovered, after finishing the book, that the author is addicted to the internet. For a moment it made me feel less likely to recommend this book. I don’t know what lessons have been learned here. She has a hundred thousand followers and recently tweeted about the Bengals game. This is a book about internet sickness by a person with internet sickness.

But is that not why it’s a perfect book about our current age? 

I think the book ended with some great revelation but I’m also not sure if it did or not, and this ambiguity makes me like it more. I think the character is meant to be seen as less addicted to her online obsessions at the end of the book because it seems that she doesn’t post a photo of the dead baby on the internet and she gives a not-very-interesting speech at the British Museum. But, also, she still thinks about the portal obsessively. She seems to use it obsessively, albeit she doesn’t engage with it as she did before. She doesn’t represent herself on the portal as much as she did before, even if it still consumes her mind.  

A book to pair with No One is Talking About This:

I recommend reading How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell before reading this book, or immediately after, or at the same time. I think Patricia Lockwood should read that book, although I’m sure she already has.