In conversation with novelist Clare Beams, author of The Illness Lesson

From the singular voice of Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This is a Booker Prize finalist and a New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of 2021—a love letter to the endless scroll of social media and a profound, modern meditation on love, language, and human connection.

As this urgent, genre-defying book opens, a woman recently elevated to prominence for her social media posts is navigating the rules of what she terms “the portal,” where she grapples with her conviction that a chorus of voices is dictating her thoughts. As existential threats—from climate change and economic uncertainty to the rise of a dictator and an epidemic of loneliness—begin to loom, she posts deeper into the portal’s void. When alarming texts from her mother pierce the fray, real life and its stakes collide with the absurd antics of the portal. The woman now confronts a world that contains proof that there is goodness, empathy, and justice in the universe, and a deluge of evidence to the contrary.

Patricia Lockwood is the author of the novel No One Is Talking About This, the memoir Priestdaddy, and the poetry collections Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals and Balloon Pop Outlaw Black. She is a Booker Prize finalist and her books have been named on The New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of 2021 (No One Is Talking About This) and 2017 (Priestdaddy). Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and the London Review of Books, where she is a contributing editor.