She endows her unnamed narrator with the same skills and dubs her an “expert” on internet culture, a persona both women seem to find ridiculous.

Lockwood is a poet and the author of “ Priestdaddy” - her eyebrow-wiggling account of life with her priest father - but she is perhaps primarily known as a Twitter superuser. You read it the way you scan social media, hopping from one thought to another if Lockwood could have delivered her manuscript in a scrolling format, I think she might have. In the London Review of Books, Lockwood wrote that the novel began as “a diary of what it felt like to be in the days of its snowy white disintegration, which felt also like the disintegration of my own mind.” As on Twitter, there’s very little plot - or rather there are waves of plot that peak in froths of excitement and then dissolve. I imagine she’d consider it a win to push a critic into paralysis, a state so often induced by her core subject, which is Twitter: its twisted sense of righteousness, absurd heightening of self-importance and superglue hold over its users. Should I revel in its cathartic eventual escape from social media, or pan it for wallowing so, so long in the very online? I am, as a famously wounded suitor once put it, half agony, half hope. Never before has a novel left me so internally polarized. Patricia Lockwood’s “ No One Is Talking About This” is either a work of genius or an exasperating endurance trial. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.

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