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I just read No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood. All I knew about it was that it was shortlisted for the Booker prize, was named one of the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2021, and that David Sedaris said “I can’t remember the last time I laughed so much reading a book.”
And not that I think they should actually do this, but I wish someone had told me “content warning: social media feeds.” After spending the last few years untethering from social media, it was startling to read a book that is, at least for the first half, almost entirely a recreation of a social media feed (this is not a spoiler — if you look at the first two pages you’ll see this).
In another mood I might have laughed along with David Sedaris. Instead I found it terrifying. Is this how our brains work now? Is this the only way we can consume information, even literary information?
In the end, I found the book to be masterful and heartfelt, but I don’t know if I liked it, because the experience of reading it was so, honestly, triggering. After years of reforming my brain from craving that quick-bit, quick-bit onslaught of other people’s hot takes, it was startling and unsettling to experience that in a paper book I was holding in my hands.
Lindsay Eagar told me about an essay called 14 Warning Signs That You Are Living in a Society Without a Counterculture, and it’s a super interesting essay, but to read it right after No One is Talking About This was a big bucket of melancholy. Not to be bleak but is this it, then? The dominant, moneymaking creative works will all resemble the feeds and big tech algorithms? Yikes.
“Why were we all writing like this now?” writes Lockwood in No One is Talking About This, and then goes on to say that maybe we’re all writing like this because “it was the way the portal wrote” (the portal is her term for the internet). She also says this: “Increasingly we were worried about the new sense of humor…The funniest thing now, it seemed, was a fake ad for a product that couldn’t exist, and how were we supposed to laugh at that, when the thought of a product that couldn’t exist made us so unhappy?”
The whole book is, in many ways, a meditation on this: is this how we are now? We write in the same way, we have the same new sense of humor, we stare at our phones all day long and await new instructions for how we’re supposed to think and write and laugh.
Is everything the same? Is everything mainstream? Is there no counterculture?
Well, look, I’m no expert on culture or counterculture. But I will say that I have felt the pervasiveness of the way writing shows up on social media, the way internetspeak clawed its way into my brain and hung on, laughing at memes. “Don’t @ me!” it yelled. “Chef’s kiss! lol whut! this!”
So after a full-on aura cleansing and a ritual bath and a silent retreat and building myself a cabin in the woods (or, ok, a long hot shower, a walk, and a shed in my backyard), I’m not so bleak. There’s hope.
Remember that you have control over the stories you want to tell. In fact, your stories and your writing are all you have control over in this business, really. So take control. What kind of stories do you want to tell?
I know I want to make people laugh. I know that readers are smart and I want my stories to be smart. I want my stories to be layered, interesting, and subtle. I want to walk down the many wide paths of my own brain and go to the corners of weirdness that interest me, and tease apart those corners to see what’s underneath.
I want to tell my own stories, not the stories the internet wants me to tell. Not the stories I think the internet can handle.
The internet isn’t a person. The internet can’t buy a book. The internet might be mostly robots.
People are who buy books, and read them.
I think people who buy books and read them might like to get lost in a story. I think people who buy books and read them can handle a lengthy analog diversion and a journey of a tale. And I think people who buy books and read them can handle characters who take them by the hand, lead them to a comfortable chair, and then who also take their phones and very sweetly throw them out the window.
Thoughts and Links
I changed the Do the Work settings on Substack so that everyone can comment on posts now, not just paying subscribers, fyi.
Did you know the amazing Carter Higgins had TWO books come out last week? Audrey L and Audrey W: True Creative Talents, illustrated by Jennifer K. Mann, the second book in a series which has been touted as the next Ivy & Bean, and A Story Is to Share: How Ruth Krauss Found Another Way to Tell a Tale, illustrated by Isabelle Arsenault, which is a biography of a picture book icon, and a must-read for anyone writing picture books.
Lindsay (who I’ve already talked about once in this newsletter) posted an illuminating essay yesterday about money. How much can we expect to earn a living off of writing?
I nodded along (alas) while reading this essay from Erin Bowman (“Does pursuing success make authors unhappy?”).
There are a lot of great looking finds, as always, in the Short Box Comics Fair. I’ve gotten piles of them in the past and unleashed them on my family at the holidays.
Somehow the trailer for Wish Upon a Wedding came into my YouTube queue, and it looks ridiculous (a woman plans her wedding, even though she’s single? and the wedding is in a month?) BUT ALSO it looks like it’s about people making picture books, implausibly, in the way they get made in movies (that is, quickly, and without an editor or art director’s input) so I’m tempted to watch it for laughs.
What a breath of fresh air! I, too, have largely decoupled from social media and deleted chat apps like Slack from my phone. The withdrawal is real. I keep grabbing the phone to check things or send messages. Sitting and reading a book, something I used to spend hours doing without a single feeling of anxiety or guilt, has become a chore--even when it's a great book.
We all need to re-train our brains to escape The Pattern (https://ungated.media/manifesto) and reclaim our ability to focus. And those "analog diversions" are the way to do it. For me, that's books, knitting, and good phone conversations. 😇 There's also that mysterious thing called being "face to face" with people...no screen in between!
I'm about to go on a "Read ALL the Julie F. emails" bender for behaving myself and even (gasp!) meeting people IRL at my first in-person kidlit conference, Julie! :) LOL! Expect lots of "like hearts" over the next while. "Treat yo' self, Elayne!"