patricia lockwood no one is talking about this

Lockwood with her cats, Gilly and Fenriz (a.k.a. “It’s where I do all my writing, good and bad,” she says wryly. Lockwood, 38, now lives a Proustian and somewhat less online existence, writing from the comfort of her bed. The Guardian credited Lockwood with “casually reawakening a generation’s interest in poetry,” and soon widespread recognition followed, with Lockwood’s second book of poems, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, landing to great acclaim Priestdaddy’s critical victory lap would follow three years later. Though Lockwood published her first collection of poems with an independent press in 2012, she erupted into the mainstream literary firmament in 2013 with the publication of “ Rape Joke,” a tragicomic poem about a traumatic experience from her teenhood that became a viral sensation-a proto-” Cat Person,” if you will (which itself receives winky acknowledgment in No One Is Talking About This).

Her sense of humor is as manic and winning offline as it is online, all of it leavened with warmth and vulnerability.

You put your whole head through me.” Zooming with Lockwood is a delightfully antic experience, pinballing through asides about her love affair with GAP sweatsuits, digressions about how the pandemic saved us from the return of low-rise jeans, and attempts to tantalize her cat with coconut water. Take, for example, this 2011 sext: “I am a living male turtleneck. When she joined Twitter in 2011, she soon amassed a devoted following enamored by her surreal, playfully raunchy “sexts”: gnomic shards of poetry combining erotica and webspeak. At nineteen, Lockwood met her now-husband in a poetry chatroom at twenty-one, they married, and Lockwood set about seeking a wider audience for her poetry. Two decades later, Lockwood writes less about Jesus and mermaids than she once did, but the kinetic call and response that characterized her early years online now seems a blueprint for the forces animating her outstanding debut novel, No One is Talking About This, a visceral rendering of an influencer’s life in “the slipstream of information.” Though No One is Talking About This is Lockwood’s first novel, it’s also a culmination of a life made and unmade online, beginning with Lockwood’s transformative “deprogramming” from her conservative Catholic upbringing (memorably captured in her acclaimed 2017 memoir, Priestdaddy), courtesy of deep dives into progressive websites about infertility and late-term abortions.

Rumaan Alam Talks Demystifying His Writing Process.

Danielle Evans On Telling the Truth About History.

George Saunders Offers a Master Class in Fiction.

Patricia lockwood no one is talking about this