It is no easy feat to recreate life online. The jokes struggle to land on their own and, alas, already feel dated. The book lacks the visual aid of the slideshow accompanying the lecture and incorporated online in the London Review. “I’m a show-off,” she told the Guardian in 2017, “a clown.” In an interview with Sally Rooney at Poetry Ireland in early 2019, Lockwood said that the internet is “the place where I don’t have a body and so I’m not frightened of anything”.Ī portion of the novel’s first section was delivered as a lecture, The Communal Mind, at the British Museum and printed in the London Review of Books in early 2019. Her voice – whether in Twitter “sexts” or erudite yet outrageous contributions to the London Review of Books – was forged in the kiln of Web 2.0: intimate, zany, blasphemous, lewd and unabashedly performative. Lockwood’s powerful poem, Rape Joke, which first appeared in 2013 on website The Awl, was widely shared online. Having grown up in “all the worst cities of the midwest”, in her memoir she describes it as a refuge: “A place of living, moving, breathing text, a book that continually wrote itself.” She has built a devoted fanbase on Twitter for tweets such as So is Paris any good or not” and posts ventriloquising her cat.

Lockwood’s life is inextricably intertwined with the internet.

“Look how big her head is lol,” her sister had texted about an ultrasound before they realised it was a sign of abnormality. Two text messages from her mother cut the trip short: “Something has gone wrong” and “How soon can you get here?” She returns to her family home in Ohio to be with her sister, whose baby has been diagnosed with Proteus syndrome, a rare congenital disorder in utero. In the first, the unnamed protagonist – propelled to internet fame after tweeting “Can a dog be twins?” – meets fans on an international speaking tour. No One Is Talking About This cleaves into two distinct parts.

It follows the author’s poetry collections, including Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals (2014), and a memoir, Priestdaddy, which was named one of the 10 best books of 2017 by the New York Times. Patricia Lockwood’s debut novel, as she has tweeted, is “about being very inside the internet and then being very outside of it”.

No one is talking about this novel