I think that officially ‘No One is Talking About This’ is autofiction, but I’d be more inclined to call it a mess. Then we get to the afterword and it suggests that the second half of the book is actual based on truth. The tone, the style, the genre, the everything felt different and wholey unconnected. This is absolutely a novel of two parts and though I understand that Lockwood was purposefully drawing that line between online life and ‘real’ life, it didn’t work for me. I don’t want to spoil it, but it’s a tragic story and it feels like a completed different novel. The story switches to the character (who I’m pretty sure is unnamed throughout) heading home to her family for the birth of her niece. It felt empty and an attempt to make a searing, intellectual point that for me really fell flat.Īnd then it changes gears in a baffling way. There’s no story, no real character, it’s just aimless stream of consciousness that brings up old internet culture. Like scrolling through Twitter or Instagram, and the actual content felt exactly like that: a regurgitation of old memes and online phenomenons. The writing feels like the internet with rapid-fire vignettes of things to pay attention to, to consider, to laugh at, to use as a way of hiding from reality, as a type of hyper reality. I listened to the audiobook of this novel and it’s a bit dazzling and overwhelming in very much the same way as the Internet is, it’s a lot of information very quickly, and I’m not entirely sure that it’s a particularly nice reading experience.
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