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dontjudgeabrooke 's review for:
No One Is Talking About This
by Patricia Lockwood
Huh. What a delightfully weird little time capsule of a book. It's definitely esoteric and pinned to a very specific moment in time on the internet, but it has a lot of fascinating things to say about how our in-person lives intersect and contrast with our digital lives and I guarantee you've never read anything else like it.
Although it seems like a very quick read, clocking in at barely 200 pages and written in a string of brief paragraphs, I found myself really wanting to chew and suck on every little morsel Lockwood has given us (don't you dare look at how long it took me to read this). To be honest, there were a handful of passages whose intended meaning I still felt I couldn't get a firm handle on even after rereading them multiple times, but I was at least able to create some personal meaning from them, which I think is fine for this book.
Quotes that spoke to me:
Although it seems like a very quick read, clocking in at barely 200 pages and written in a string of brief paragraphs, I found myself really wanting to chew and suck on every little morsel Lockwood has given us (don't you dare look at how long it took me to read this). To be honest, there were a handful of passages whose intended meaning I still felt I couldn't get a firm handle on even after rereading them multiple times, but I was at least able to create some personal meaning from them, which I think is fine for this book.
Quotes that spoke to me:
- When something of hers sparked and spread in the portal, it blazed away the morning and afternoon, it blazed like the new California, which we had come to accept as being always on fire. She ran back and forth in the flames, not eating or drinking, emitting a high-pitched sound most humans couldn’t hear. After a while her husband might burst through that wall of swimming red to rescue her, but she would twist away and kick him in the nuts, screaming, “My whole life is in there!” as the day she was standing on broke away and fell into the sea.
- The future of intelligence must be about search, while the future of ignorance must be about the inability to evaluate information. But when she looked at the smoking landscape of fathers laid out by cable news, it seemed no longer a question of intelligence or ignorance, but one of infection. Someone, a long time ago, looked at the big gray wriggle of American fathers and saw them as what they were: just weak enough, the mass host that would carry the living message.
- How strange… to live in a country where someone can say “the massacre” and you don’t have to ask which one.
- On a slow news days, we hung suspended from meathooks, dangling over the abyss. On a fast news day, it was like we had swallowed all of NASCAR and were about to crash into the wall.
- She saw her DNA streaming backward from her body like a timeline, richly peopled with the faces of distant cousins behind bars, and she was somehow the one who had put them there, by moving the clock another age past them, by being born at all.
- The words shared reality stretched and stretched, flapped at the corners like a blue felt blanket, and failed to cover everyone’s feet at once, which all shrank from the same cold. Picture the blanket with its wide satin hem, for didn’t we all have the same one?