Books › No One Is Talking About This
No One Is Talking About This
282 pages
A hyper-ironic scroll through the digital void that suddenly shatters into a profound meditation on embodied grief and love.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like scrolling through a chaotic, endlessly fascinating timeline before suddenly looking up to face the most devastating reality imaginable. The first half is a frenetic, absurdist mirror held up to our chronically online lives, written in sharp, poetic fragments that perfectly capture the brain-rot of the digital age. But just as you settle into its wry, detached rhythm, the narrative violently shifts gears, plunging you into a deeply embodied, heartbreaking story of family tragedy. The prose remains brilliant throughout, but the irony melts away, leaving behind a tender, raw exploration of love, grief, and what it means to be a physical body in a world obsessed with the virtual. It is a masterpiece of emotional whiplash.
- Mood
- frenetic
- disorienting
- surreal
- heartbreaking
- Tone
- irreverent
- absurdist
- ironic
- devastating
- tender
- Pace
- brisk
- Themes
- the extremely online experience · digital vs physical reality · profound grief · the limits of irony · family tragedy
- The writing
- Fragmentary and poetic, oscillating wildly between vulgar internet absurdity and transcendent, lyrical beauty.
- The arc
- Moves from a state of detached, hyper-ironic digital frenzy into a profound, embodied, and devastating encounter with real-world grief and love.
- Who it's for
- Chronically online millennials, lovers of prose poetry, and anyone who has felt the whiplash between internet irony and real-world tragedy.
Content notes
- infant illness
- infant death
- grief
- medical trauma
About the book
"From "a formidably gifted writer" (The New York Times Book Review), a book that asks: Is there life after the internet? As this urgent, genre-defying book opens, a woman who has recently been elevated to prominence for her social media posts travels around the world to meet her adoring fans. She is overwhelmed by navigating the new language and etiquette of what she terms "the portal," where she grapples with an unshakable conviction that a vast chorus of voices is now dictating her thoughts. When existential threats--from climate change and economic precariousness to the rise of an unnamed dictator and an epidemic of loneliness--begin to loom, she posts her way deeper into the portal's void. An avalanche of images, details, and references accumulate to form a landscape that is post-sense, post-irony, post-everything. "Are we in hell?" the people of the portal ask themselves. "Are we all just going to keep doing this until we die?" Suddenly, two texts from her mother pierce the fray: "Something has gone wrong," and "How soon can you get here?" As real life and its stakes collide with the increasingly absurd antics of the portal, the woman confronts a world that seems to contain both an abundance of proof that there is goodness, empathy, and justice in the universe, and a deluge of evidence to the contrary"--
Description from Open Library.
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