No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood: My Review 📚📝
This book is written in as an extremely long series of atomic scenes, images, and feelings. The narrative grows slowly, as the reader pieces together this fragments into streams of consciousness. This makes the book a quick & easy read, but was clearly done by the author so that the book could be consumed similarly to how readers consume a Twitter feed.
A review my wife read said this book wouldn’t make sense to people who aren’t “extremely online”, and I agree with that. It was written in a language that I know I share with lots of people I know from the internet, but with almost no one I know from places other than the internet.
The author holds the way of being extremely online with the way of being very much rooted in the reality of human life & death. I think one of my favorite touches is how she compares the triviality with which some Very Online people treat living and dying (i.e. apocalypse and/or lack-of-will-to-live jokes) with the emotional shock and metaphysical weight of human birth & death when it’s actually encountered.
This was a good read, but it is probably for a specific audience.