no one is talking about this by patricia lockwood

Its success, though, was not quite so based on its relatability-few other people outside the Lockwood family know what it’s like to grow up with a Catholic priest for a father, after all.

Lockwood’s 2017 memoir, Priestdaddy, offers a similar sensibility and crystalline sentence-to-sentence beauty, as does her other work, along with an ability to straddle the sacred and profane with ease. The inclination to share “Rape Joke” as soon as it had been read was no doubt due, in part, to its feeling of innate familiarity to so many of its readers.

“It’s a very poetic punishment for me, and probably a good way for me to end my online career.” For a while, Lockwood-whose debut novel, No One Is Talking about This, is narrated by a woman who is, at its start, Extremely Online-could barely even hold her phone. “I used to be able to scroll until I couldn’t feel my fingertip.” But now, she can’t scroll at all. “I actually feel a fiery, burning sensation,” Lockwood told me over the phone recently. Since Patricia Lockwood contracted coronavirus last March, she has grappled with a variety of what are considered long-term symptoms of the disease, including intense neuropathy-damage to the brain and spinal cord that often manifests as pain in the hands and feet, concentrated in the clusters of nerves that gather at these farthest reaches of the body. Bristling with nerve endings, they are in constant communication with our brains as they relay information and act on impulses they don’t respond to our consciousness, but rather form it-ten different starting points for our thoughts and feelings. Our fingertips are among the most sensitive parts of our bodies.

No one is talking about this by patricia lockwood