Patricia Lockwood on the Absurdity of Modern Life and Being Too Online – ELLE.com

"God has given us the internet as a hamster wheel... strap in and ride, bitch, Patricia Lockwood tweeted gleefully in January. The droll author has just released her first novel, No One Is Talking About This, in which she channels the whirling dervish of feeling awestruck/horrified/seduced by the online experience: that new slipstream of information, that locus of context collapse! Lockwood has previously published two books of poetry and the 2017 memoir Priestdaddy and contributes to the London Review of Books (including an uproarious deep dive into John Updikes slimy catalogue). Her latest work features an unnamed woman with ascendant social media notoriety navigating what she terms the portal, a Donnie Darko-sounding term for inglorious Twitter.

The portal is a mlange of observations (Capitalism! It was important to hate it, even though it was how you got money) and imagistic curios (a chihuahua perched on a mans erection, memorably). A critic for Bookforum marveled of Lockwood: Reading her metaphors is like watching someone pull out a scalpel and cut the cleanest line youve ever seen, and then in the next sentence throw the knife over her shoulder with her eyes closed, grinning. In a whiplash shift of tone, the novels second half shifts the stakes from digital absurdities to heartsick circumstances around early mortality and deep loss.

No One Is Talking about This

Lockwood spoke to ELLE.com via email about rethinking approaches to history, replicating internet behavioral patterns in literature, and the real necessity of charging ones phone in a separate room at night.

I liked the idea of there being an echo of internet language in the title, something almost co-written, that had been passed from hand to hand and put to many different purposes. And the protagonist puts the line to her own purpose in the second half of the book; she speaks of wanting to stop people in the hallways, grip them by the arm, and tell them what is happening to her and the people she loves. Do you know about this? No one is talking about this! I think in that moment, this becomes an all-encompassing word, able to contain anything, even a whole human life.

I dont think I couldve written it any other wayI had to work in the portals own form. The book had to resemble that reading experience, both in its fragmented nature and its sense of falling through a series of someone elses thoughts.

And as for it coalescing, part of the danger and the exhilaration of working on a book like this is that you dont know if it ever fully does. Its like the mercury the protagonist speaks of in the novels second half; the beads of it are always trembling toward each other, trying to come together into one shining piece.

Disparate-feeling moods is probably an understatement, haha. The first part takes place mostly inside the internet, so we see the protagonists face lit by that gentle blue glow. The second part is set in the heart of her family, and the light is that fluorescent light that we experience in the most urgent human situations. I united those moods for the simple reason that life unites them: Real life breaks in on us when we are doing something else, mindlessly moving among unexamined others, wasting our wonderful time.

Real life breaks in on us when we are doing something else, mindlessly moving among unexamined others, wasting our wonderful time.

Are we even in charge of our own informational hierarchies? I dont know the date of the Treaty of Versailles, but in its place Im storing the memory of that video a woman made to explain Gritty to the French. Gritty is popular because of nihilism. For some time, Americans have felt that life has no meaning. Gritty also has no meaning. It might seem that we have willfully and obstinately chosen the path of the absurd, but I think we have done so for a reason. The stones of historythe facts, the dates, the interpretationsno longer march in any sort of order, and neither does there seem to be an overarching narrative to modern life. How else have we experienced the last four, ten, twenty years but as an endless series of absurdities? To reflect that is realism, not perversity.

Perhaps I should have said that I wasnt concerned about having good taste, because I knew that was a standard I would never meet. But this knowledge freed me too. It allowed me tohunt my own Bigfoot, is what I wanted to write, so Ill just go with that. I was able to be idiosyncratic in my reading, my obsessions, the literary routes I traveled. As for my own criticism, I do write about a lot of dead people, and its hard to be wrong about dead people in a way that anyone cares about. So I wouldnt describe myself as a tastemaker so much as a little freaky clerk in the dead letter office, or a silverfish that has turned completely transparent in a library.

As a critic you pay more attention to structureyou often have to reverse-engineer a novel in order to think about it roundly. So probably some of those thoughts about structure do make their way into my own work, buttress it a bit, give it a nice bony nose. But my turn as a critic is also fairly recent, within the last few years, and I developed my voice and my aesthetic long before I thought of writing from the other side.

How else have we experienced the last four, ten, twenty years but as an endless series of absurdities? To reflect that is realism, not perversity.

2011 Twitter was truly a wild wild west; we followed each other early on and I think I just asked her! I even paid myself for her cover art for Balloon Pop Outlaw Black, which I love so much. We definitely share an aesthetic that is very centered on the body but also out in space, shooting starlight from every hole. Cartoonish, in the most playful sense of the word.

I do often have a vision of my workIm an unusually visual reader and that extends to my writing as well. I experience individual words as both images and tactile sensations, which I guess qualifies as synesthesia, though my form of it is not very flashy. Actually, I had a bit in the book for a while that talked about the protagonists overly literal case of synesthesia, where she saw ice cubes when she read the word refrigerator and heard a fife whenever she thought about the Revolutionary War, and thats pretty much me.

Its the easiest rule, and so impossible to live by: Dont look at your phone first thing in the morning! Charge it in another room, so you dont wake up at 4 a.m. and accidentally learn something new from British Twitter about Piers Morgan! No, when Im living my best life Im surrounded by books and pens and papers until three or four in the afternoon, totally absorbed, with a cat spread completely across my notebook because she hates all my ideas and wants me to become a tuna fisherman. Too online for me is absolutely a physical sensation, as it must be for all of us. When my blood starts to feel like Predator blood, I know that I have to get off.

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Patricia Lockwood on the Absurdity of Modern Life and Being Too Online - ELLE.com