The day before my interview with the poet, essayist, memoirist and novelist Patricia Lockwood, the attempted coup took place in Washington DC. She, like myself and millions of others, followed it online, scrolling for hours, watching as President Trump continued to incite his fans by posting untruths about the election. Whatever divide ever existed between the real and virtual worlds was as decisively shattered as the Capitols windows.
WHAT A DAY TO BE SITTING ON YOUR BUTT IN FRONT OF THE COMPUTER, EH, Lockwood emailed me from her home in Savannah, Georgia, using the all-caps and no-punctuation style that all of us who spend too much time online recognise as meta sarcasm: sarcasm but also sarcastically mocking the obviousness of the sarcasm.
I tell her that Ive spent 127 hours on Twitter. Lockwood is often described as the poet laureate of Twitter and the 38-year-old originally made a name for herself with her joyfully weird tweets, such as her parodies of sexts (I am a Dan Brown novel and you do me in my plot-hole. Wow, I yell in ecstasy, This makes no sense at all. And asking the Paris Review: So is Paris any good or not (no punctuation, of course.) So I feel no shame in admitting my social media addiction to her.
It was like every hour became somehow cubic and we were chained up in it like a murder basement, she writes back, combining the punchy hyperbole of Twitter (murder basement) with the lyrical originality (every hour became somehow cubic) that has made her a literary star. As well as two poetry collections (Balloon Pop Outlaw Black and Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals), she has published a bestselling memoir, 2017s Priestdaddy, about when she and her husband were forced to move back in with her mother and her raucously eccentric father, who became a Catholic priest after watching The Exorcist 72 times. She is also a contributing editor for the London Review of Books where she wrote about her recent experience with long-term Covid, which she caught when travelling to Harvard last year to give a lecture. She had a bad bout of it: Everyone I know who had Covid says that at some point in the night they felt like, OK, body, you had a good run, were over now. But so many people died who didnt have to, she says. Whereas she used to travel often, she has been largely housebound for the past year, partly due to the lockdown, but mainly becasue of her health. She still cant type due to the arthritis she developed: See how the joints are crazy prominent? she says, holding up her palms, joints pressing through the flesh. So she largely dictates her notes: But I have to consider myself lucky, even though I cant use my hands.
When Lockwood was a young unknown, her poems occasionally getting plucked from the slush piles of literary magazines, posting online taught her how to let her personality shine through in her writing. She has always had an almost synaesthetic reaction to words: When I read the words moonlit swim I saw the moonlight slicked all over the bare skin. The word sunshine had a washed look, with the sweep of a rag in the middle of it, she writes in Priestdaddy, something she puts down to being, she says, not a neurotypical person. Whether shes writing a poem about Shirley Temple (Shirley Temple what makes you cry. What do / you think of to make you cry. Mommies stand / in a circle and whisper to her, Shirley Temple / there will be war. Shirley Temple youll get no / lunch) or describing the decor of a restaurant in Priestdaddy (a fake cactus threw up its helpless arms, as if my father were holding it at gunpoint), there is the impression that Lockwood is getting as much of a kick out of her gleefully unique prose as the reader.
Absolutely Im the Barbra Streisand of tasting my own voice. I dont have any problems with procrastination where writing is concerned, she says. Writing on the internet helped her to find that pleasure in her originality. But in around 2012, she noticed there was increasingly a conformity in online writing: the hyperbole, the all-caps, the meta sarcasm, the coining of a universal internet-speak. Her debut novel, No One Is Talking About This, published in the UK next month, has already garnered praise from Sally Rooney and was extracted in the New Yorker last year (Now everyone is talking about this, an American writer emailed me, deliberately invoking the excitement around the extract, and also, less deliberately, his jealousy of the size of the literary spotlight accorded to Lockwood.) The novel began as a diary in which she wrote about being on the internet and the feeling my thoughts were being dictated.
You have to look for where the language goes crunchy, where everybody starts saying the same things and formulating their reactions in the same way and step out of it, Lockwood says. The result of this stepping out is an extraordinarily original novel about interplay between the online and real worlds, one which would have felt bitingly relevant anyway, but now feels almost painfully so. On the day of our interview which we, inevitably, conduct online the newspaper headlines are that Trump will be banned from Twitter. In Lockwoods book he is referred to ironically-but-also-not-ironically as the dictator.
We could all see [how Trump used Twitter] and that lets people take a book about Twitter more seriously. But good luck describing the book! she laughs.
Here goes. The first half is about the unnamed and extremely online (Extremely Online, as extremely online people put it) protagonists life on social media, where she communicates in memes (SHOOT IT IN MY VEINS), talks in the new shared sense of humour (ironic, doomy, deliberately exclusive) and makes herself care about the things that they care about (Every fiber in her being strained. She was trying to hate the police). She watches how peoples behaviour changes online, individually and collectively (A man who three years ago only ever posted things like Im a retard with butt aids was now exhorting people to open their eyes to the power of socialism, which suddenly did seem the only way). She also explains the reason for those changes in passages that evoke proper laughter as opposed to merely an emoji laughing face:
White people, who had the political educations of potatoes, were suddenly feeling compelled to speak about injustice. This happened once every forty years on average, usually after a period when folk music became popular again. When folk music became popular again, it reminded people that they had ancestors, and then, after a considerable delay, that their ancestors had done bad things.
The book is formatted into bite-sized paragraphs, so it feels as if you are scrolling down a social media timeline. It is also largely autobiographical and in the second half a devastating family tragedy occurs, and the protagonist mentally returns to the offline world. Whereas in the first half of the book the narrators biological sex is irrelevant, in the second half the offline part it is inescapable as she is forced to confront issues such as abortion rights, pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood. On the internet people send her memes, in the real world they ask her why she hasnt had a baby yet.
Ive always felt like a grey alien whos forced to wear a bikini in summer, and I dont know if Im capable of having children, which disqualifies me from traditional womanhood to a lot of people. I think that is what is so attractive about the internet to me and people like me: you can exist there as a spirit in the void, Lockwood says.
Lockwood is all too aware that books about the internet have a bad reputation: [They] had the strong whiff of old white intellectuals being weird about the blues, with possible boner involvement, she writes in Nobody Is Talking About This. There is no boner pressure here. The novel captures better than anything Ive ever read what its like to be online, which is not a surprise, given how enmeshed Lockwoods life is with the internet: as well as originally coming to prominence on Twitter, she met her husband Jason Kendall online (in a poetry chatroom so innocent). Lockwood had no doubt that she could pull off this high-wire act of a book: I have never experienced a lack of confidence, because Im an extreme megalomaniac, she says, ironically-but-not-ironically. I think this is something I inherited from my dad. This is a guy who believes he has the vocation to be a Catholic priest, so maybe if you grow up seeing something like that you get weird ideas about what youre set on Earth to do.
As deeply enjoyable as Nobody Is Talking About This is, as I read it I wondered if this ephemeral thing Twitter was a worthy subject for Lockwoods enduring talent. So many people are spending all their time on it, and its a worthwhile topic just for that reason, she says. Even politicians communicate in internet-speak now: Hillary Clinton tweeted the meme Delete your account at Trump and Barack Obama teases Joe Biden with visual memes. It is wallpapering the brains of those of us who use it too much, as much as its warping our politics, so Lockwood is right: it is absurd to treat Twitter as irrelevant. But was she worried that those who arent Extremely Online would be put off by the books Extreme Online-ness?
I never thought about the non-Extremely Online reactions, she says. But yes, you want [the book] to stand up to the test of time, but also to preserve the vernacular, so thats the line youre walking.
The internet can be a place where you hide yourself behind memes, or post your most intimate thoughts. Lockwood has generally taken the former approach, revealing little of her life online. But in her publishing career, she has gone the other way. In 2012 the website, the Awl, published her poem, Rape Joke, which was far sparser than her previous poems. It was also, unusually, autobiographical, describing when she was raped when she was 19.
My work up to that point was so non-autobiographical, I was like a little Wallace Stevens: Look at this jar, its on a hill! Im barely here! So maybe if you keep the autobiographical dammed up for so long, it emerges in something like Rape Joke, she says.
After years of just scraping by, Rape Joke propelled her to literary celebrity, aided by Lockwoods original support system, the internet, where the poem went viral, as poems rarely do. After that she published Priestdaddy, in which she described her peripatetic childhood in the midwest with her charismatic but also batshit crazy a lot conservative parents, her attempted suicide as a teenager and her adult writing career. She writes about her parents very fondly, but says if she was still living with them Id be back on the mental ward, because of [their] politics. Her father was, she says, an early inhabitant of the rightwing alternate reality and is a fan of conservative figureheads such as Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter (but not Fox News: Too liberal.)
One of the first experiences I had of someone whose language was going crunchy was when Id hear him say something and think: Thats not something he came up with himself, hes repeating something that someone else told him. That struck me as strange, she says.
On the one hand, Lockwoods rise to fame looks like an eminently 21stcentury story: she made her name on Twitter and she has now written two books that at least touch on the online world. But she also took a more traditional path, achieving literary acclaim by writing about her most personal experiences, something women writers from Nora Ephron to Elizabeth Wurtzel have done for decades.
Priestdaddy came out at the height of the cult of the personal essay, when [publishers] were encouraging young women to write these books of hyper-revealing essay and not protecting them . With Priestdaddy, I recognised all that to be true and also I knew I could write a good book and thats what I had to concentrate on, she says.
Did she feel protected after Rape Joke came out? I dont think you can be protected, and I did feel vulnerable. Still now Ill be caught off guard if Im being introduced somewhere for a reading and the very first thing they say about me is that I wrote Rape Joke, and Im supposed to get up there and make a funny joke. Ill sometimes go completely quiet and you can see Im experiencing something traumatic in real time. But its still a poem that I wrote, she says.
Lockwood is currently working on a collection of short stories. I ask if she had always wanted to write stories and she says she doesnt plan her books that way: When Im working on something, I like to use extremely wet clay rather than chipping from a block of marble. So I start a book by nudging my way into dark corners, she says, taking palpable pleasure from each of the words, possibly picturing a woodland animal, or herself, burrowing through the mud. Eventually, a path reveals itself, she smiles.
What had the beautiful thought been, the bright profundity she had roused herself to write down? She opened her notebook with the sense of anticipation she always felt on such occasions perhaps this would finally be it, the one they would chisel on her gravestone. It read:
chuck e cheese can munch a hole in my you-know-what
***
After you died, she thought as she carefully washed her legs under the fine needles of water, for she had recently learned that some people didnt, you would see a little pie chart that told you how much of your life had been spent in the shower arguing with people you had never met. Oh but like that was somehow less worthy than spending your time carefully monitoring the thickness of beaver houses for signs of the severity of the coming winter?
***
Was she stimming? She feared very much that she was.
***
Things that were always there:
The sun.
Her body, and the barest riffling at the roots of her hair.An almost music in the air, unarranged and primary and swirling, like yarns laid out in their colors waiting.The theme song of a childhood show where mannequins came to life at night in a department store.Anonymous History Channel footage of gray millions on the march, shark-snouted airplanes, silk deployments of missiles, mushroom clouds.An episode of True Life about a girl who liked to oil herself up, get into a pot with assorted vegetables, and pretend that cannibals were going to eat her. Sexually.The almost-formed unthought, Is there a bug on me???
A great shame about all of it, all of it.
No One Is Talking About This is published by Bloomsbury Circus.
Read the rest here:
Patricia Lockwood: 'That's what's so attractive about the internet: you can exist there as a spirit in the void - The Guardian