Patricia Lockwood: “I like the things people on the internet can’t talk about.”
Miscellaneous Files is a series of virtual studio visits that uses images, videos, and other fragments from writers’ digital devices to understand their practice. Conceived by Mary Wang, each interview provides an intimate look into the artistic process.
A Twitter sage and a comforting voice of the digital age, reliably funnier, more incisive, and better able to deliver near-perfect commentary on both the quotidian and the serious than perhaps anyone else on the platform, Patricia Lockwood is a rare gem of joy—offering chaotic good in an online world that typically leans toward chaotic evil.
Following two books of poetry, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black and Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, Lockwood’s 2017 memoir, Priestdaddy, was an immediate hit. In it, she took the open, wry, and self-deprecating humor she’s known for on Twitter and directed it at her own family, considering them through the lens of the internet—where anything can be a joke if you frame it right. Her essays for the London Review of Books frequently invoke her online life, and it was there that she dropped an essay about what it’s really like to live online (it was later presented as a Powerpoint lecture at the British Museum). That essay felt like a crystallization of the Lockwoodian view of the world, pointing out the patent absurdity of our moment and the way we process it. This essay would become the basis for her much-awaited first novel, No One Is Talking About This.
“I’ve always been able to tell, going back to 2011, what belonged in my notebook versus what belonged online,” she told me over a Zoom chat in early February. “[These are] observations that almost feel like they fit in the portal but actually don’t, are standing outside it or weren’t quite okay to say in there.” The portal is a term the novel’s narrator, and Lockwood herself, uses as a stand-in for both “a micro-blogging siteTwitter but that I’m not going to say Twitter” and for the internet as a whole. It’s an apt metaphor; we use the phrase “sucked in” to refer to accidental time wasted on apps, and being totally immersed in something online can feel like stepping through a screen and into another world. In the novel, Lockwood’s narrator has become mildly famous for being funny online and essentially lives in the portal. Through her, we see just how much of our lived reality is fabricated through what happens on screens.
