No one is talking about Patricia Lockwood — at least in Savannah, it seems. Of course, everybody else is talking about her, and her highly anticipated debut novel, “No One is Talking About This.”
“No one knows I live here,” Lockwood said semi-jokingly in an interview that veered into a dizzying range of topics including her dislike of Arnold the Aardvark, the stagnant evolution of jeans, and her brain scrambling long-term COVID-19 symptoms that she documented in a candidly hilarious essay for the London Review of Books, for which she is now a contributing editor.
Lockwood is the author of two wondrously weird poetry collections, “Balloon Pop Outlaw Black” and “Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals,” as well as a memoir, “Priestdaddy,” about her eccentric Catholic priest father, which was named one of New York Times Top Ten Best Books of 2017 and awarded the Thurber Prize for American Humor.
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Of course, before becoming a literary superstar, Lockwood was internet famous for surreally evocative “sexts” (“I am a living male turtleneck. You are an art teacher in winter. You put your whole head through me”) and clever tweets like the time she asked The Paris Review, “So is Paris any good or not” prompting the hallowed literary journal to respond with a full review of the city.
The attention for her steady stream of wild and brilliant tweets earned her the title of “Poet Laureate of Twitter.”
Lockwood’s debut novel is a semi-autobiographical story about a narrator who is “extremely online” until a family tragedy pulls her out of “the portal” and forces her to confront the world outside of the internet. Like Lockwood, the narrator travels around the world giving lectures, but in a self-satirical twist, is famous for a single tweet, “Can a dog be twins?” The narrator begins to worry that “the portal” is changing the way people think and write, creating a communal mind, but finds herself being pulled inescapably deeper and deeper into the web.
“I had had an idea that half of the book would take place inside the internet and half of it would take place outside the internet, but I had a very different idea of what the other half was going to be,” explained Lockwood. “I thought the internet was going to be a sort of frame story and the other part of the story would take place in space, but that was not what came to pass.”
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What changed the direction of the novel was the news that Lockwood’s expectant sister’s baby was diagnosed with Proteus Syndrome, a rare condition associated with the Elephant Man that leads to the overgrowth of bone. Lockwood rushed to her family’s side and spent the next six months helping take care of her newborn niece.
The second half of the novel is a fictionalized account of Lockwood’s experience with her family and the intense and sublime focus they devoted to the baby.
“It is a sort of focusing event where you’re all together and you are doing the thing that is really urgent and that really matters in that moment,” said Lockwood. “I was thinking that if this had happened a year or two later, it would have been a pandemic and none of us would be able to be with my sister. You think about the things you were grateful for at that time, but you don’t think about the fact that you should be grateful to have even been there, to have been able to travel, to touch people, be in hospital rooms with people. I don’t think people are getting to hang out in the NICU the way we were anymore, just reading to infants.”
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Despite the tragic nature of her experience, Lockwood never loses her penchant for surreal wordplay, vulgar humor, and poetic beauty.
“There are tone issues, although I think the fun thing about this book is there are so many of those anyway, or people might think there would be, but, I think it ended up knitting together nicely because it’s not like you suddenly start using only serious language when something tragic comes into your life,” said Lockwood.
“You continue to use the language, the inside jokes you developed as a person and as a family. That’s part of what I wanted to show, that you go on talking that way, in fact this is what people do in the circumstances, they use those private languages that they’ve developed together.”
The novel’s style, which is written in small social media post-sized chunks, is informed by Lockwood’s pedigree as a poet and Twitter queen.
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“A part of it is parodic, and part of it is quite naturally the way ‘the portal’ writes,” explained Lockwood.
There is the added benefit of the novel being highly approachable for readers.
“A lot of people have talked about having trouble reading this past year, but saying they were able to read this,” said Lockwood. “I think a lot of people have had concentration issues during the pandemic and have had trouble reading ‘real’ books.’Luckily, I wrote a totally ‘un-real’ book that is very easy to read. In fact, it could probably be read in one sitting in a single afternoon.”
When asked if writing the novel made her more aware of the molding affect of the internet, Lockwood replied, “I started the book because I became hyper-aware of these things. I actually became less aware as the composition of the book went on because you just couldn’t physically be on the internet as much as previously, because you’re in a hospital and your phone is in a Ziploc bag, and everything is sterile”
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Like the dual experiences of the novel, Lockwood seems to unconsciously describe life in reality when talking about the internet.
“There are these days where I know important things happened in terms of memes, changing language, events in the news, that I was never there for and you can never really piece those things together again, you have to be present for the entire experience. If you miss a day, it’s gone.”
Signed copies of “No One is Talking About This” featuring unique drawings by the author are available at The Book Lady Book Store and E. Shaver Books.
IF YOU WATCH
WHAT: Zoom Webinar Author series with Patricia Lockwood, “No One is Talking About This”
WHEN: Friday at 7 p.m.
COST: Free
INFO: eshaverbooks.com
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