No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood

Published 2021 · 224 pages · 41,927 words · about 3 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction

How hard is No One Is Talking About This to read?

No One Is Talking About This scores 59 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 52 out of 100
Lockwood writes in the language of the internet, full of memes, references, and the particular rhythms of online speech. The vocabulary is contemporary and accessible, though some references may date quickly.
Sentence structure: 60 out of 100
The first half is fragmented into short paragraphs that mimic the scroll of social media. The second half settles into more sustained prose, creating a formal shift that mirrors the emotional one.
Abstraction: 62 out of 100
The portal sections grapple with questions about consciousness, collective experience, and the nature of reality online. The second half becomes starkly concrete, grounded in bodies and presence.
Information density: 55 out of 100
The first section is dense with references and observations, mimicking information overload. The second half slows down, making space for attention and care.
Narrative indirection: 65 out of 100
The fragmented first half offers glimpses rather than narrative. The second half tells a more direct story, but meaning emerges from the juxtaposition of the two modes.
Symbolic density: 58 out of 100
The portal becomes a symbol for collective consciousness and its discontents. The baby at the book's center represents everything the portal cannot contain—presence, embodiment, the irreducible real.
Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
The first half maintains the ironic detachment of internet culture. The second half shatters that distance with an emotional directness that feels almost transgressive.
Resolution withholding: 60 out of 100
The book moves toward its ending with a sense of inevitability, but refuses easy comfort. What remains is presence, attention, love—not resolution.
Structural complexity: 62 out of 100
The two-part structure creates a formal argument: the fragmented portal versus the undivided attention required by love and loss. The form is essential to the meaning.

How No One Is Talking About This is regarded

No One Is Talking About This holds a literary regard score of 56 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Prizes

What No One Is Talking About This asks you to hold together

No One Is Talking About This sustains Formal (11) on the Model of Hierarchical Complexity: a line between variables. Its highest passage reaches the same stage on pages 3–7. Read from the full text, all 72 passages. What the stages mean.

Where No One Is Talking About This sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (72 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, No One Is Talking About This scores 80 out of 100. A second mythos, romance, pulls at it with a weight of 0.15. About the map of stories.

Mode: Ironic
Was she stimming? She feared very much that she was.
Symbol: Formal
the spiderweb of human connection grown so thick it was almost a shimmering and solid silk
Mythos: Irony iv (irony iv)
Hic, hic, hic, the baby said, the faint voltage of I am ran and kept running as long as it could.
Genre: Anatomy + Confession
Why were we all writing like this now? Because a new kind of connection had to be made, and blink, synapse, little space-between was the only way to make it.

Where the story of No One Is Talking About This takes place

  • The portal and the international lecture circuit under 'the dictator', 2016-2019 (2016 to 2019), the main setting
  • The portal (the internet as a placeless collective mind) (2017 to 2019)
  • Ohio hospital and the sister's suburban house, baby's life and death, c. 2018-2019 (2018 to 2019)

5 things that are true of No One Is Talking About This, with the passage for each

  1. The narrator has become famous for a post that consists of only four words.

    She had become famous for a post that said simply, Can a dog be twins? That was it.

  2. Her cat is named Dr. Butthole.

    Now her cat was called Dr. Butthole.

  3. Her husband protests the new regime by getting the words STOP IT tattooed small near his hairline.

    He settled finally on getting the words STOP IT in very small letters right near his hairline

  4. The baby's condition is diagnosed as Proteus syndrome, which the doctors say is one in a billion.

    The words the doctors said were Proteus syndrome, the words they said were one in a billion

  5. The baby dies at six months and one day old.

    Six months and one day old.

Scenes in No One Is Talking About This that Frye would name

47 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Pathos, untitled
Hic, hic, hic, the baby said, the faint voltage of I am ran and kept running as long as it could. The baby's death scene, with morphine given in the heel 'like mythology'.
Anagnorisis, untitled
The words the doctors said were Proteus syndrome, the words they said were one in a billion, the words they meant were Elephant Man. The diagnosis is the discovery that fixes the baby's fate and reorders the family's frame of reference.
Anagnorisis, untitled
The question that was the pure liquid element of the portal—who am I failing to protect?—had found its stopped-clock answer. The mother's message pivots the narrator out of the scroll and into recognition of what she owes.
Eiron, untitled
chuck e cheese can munch a hole in my you-know-what The narrator deflates her own supposed profundity.
Anatomy, untitled
Close-ups of nail art, a pebble from outer space, a tarantula’s compound eyes The opening catalogue sets the encyclopedic Menippean method.
Alazon, untitled
He also wore rave goggles at all times, so as to protect himself from the blinding light of cyber The fellow internet expert is a braggart impostor of the future.

Books that share these scenes with No One Is Talking About This

About the author

Patricia Lockwood