Introduction

FINALIST FOR THE 2021 BOOKER PRIZE & A NEW YORK
TIMES TOP 10 BOOK OF 2021
WINNER OF THE DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE

“A book that reads like a prose poem, at once sublime, profane, intimate, philosophical, witty and, eventually, deeply moving.” —New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice

“Wow. I can’t remember the last time I laughed so much reading a book. What an inventive and startling writer…I’m so glad I read this. I really think this book is remarkable.” —David Sedaris

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.

Fragmentary and omniscient, incisive and sincere, No One Is Talking About This is at once a love letter to the endless scroll and a profound, modern meditation on love, language, and human connection from a singular voice in American literature.

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Discussion Questions

From The Booker Prize website:

1. Can you describe the world the author depicts in the first part of the book, and how she manufactures a new kind of fragmentary language with which to evoke it?

2. What effect did this have on you?

3. The author’s observations about modern life can be piercing and funny – which of them spoke to you the most?

4. Describe how the author uses silence.

5. When the call comes from the narrator’s sister, she has spent so long in the ‘portal’ that she has no language with which to confront difficulty in the real world. Discuss this moment of rupture.

6. How did you feel when you read the second part of the book?

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