No One Is Talking About This...
So I want to start this one off with some comparisons, because No One Is Talking About This is one of those 21st century books that purports to be about THE WAY WE LIVE TODAY, especially with regard to social media, and it reminds me of another similarly marketed book I read. Actually, I’ve now read three of this genre in the last couple of years, and they adhere to that promise with varying degrees of faithfulness. The book Fake Accounts that I talked about earlier delivers on the promise and then some. It’s very much set in a world of social media obsessed ‘very-online’ types. Besides No one… and Fake Accounts, however, there’s a third book where I had to seriously wonder whether the people who wrote the back cover copy had actually read the book, in that it had very little to do with what actually occurred in the story. This is Joshua Ferris’ To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, which purports to be about ‘how social media affects our daily lives’, blah blah blah, ‘changes our way of communicating’, blah blah blah when, in actual fact, it’s about a dentist who discovers he is part of a secret society. He finds fellow members through Facebook, sure, but it’s not really an exploration of how social media affects society so much as it’s about, well, discovering you’re part of a secret society.
Okay, with that out of the way!
No One Is Talking About This, by Patricia Lockwood, is somewhere in the middle, though closer to Fake Accounts in terms of fulfilling its promise. That being said, while the latter really did make me think about the differences between our personalities online versus in person, I can’t say Lockwood’s book did quite the same. Unlike the Ferris book, though, it didn’t diminish my enjoyment of the novel, because what it’s ‘Really About’ is still something quite interesting and even moving.
(It also boasts a title that is one of my least favorite trends on social media, where people post well-researched and reported articles about some event in world news, and says “How come no one is talking about this?!” Well, I dunno, clearly some people are talking a lot about it. If you mean, why are you and your dumb friends not talking about it… well, that’s a question for you all to answer yourselves, I think.)
No One Is Talking About This is written in the first person, like Fake Accounts, from the point of view of a woman who spends a lot of her time online, talking to people through her social media accounts, mainly Twitter (Fake Accounts was mainly about Instagram, for what it’s worth). Unlike Fake Accounts, however, this hero is much more likable and sympathetic. I don’t personally care if a hero is likable or unlikeable, but just noting this because it contributes to the overall tone of the book, which is one of tenderness, humor, and grief, rather than biting satire. What throws her out of her orbit is a medical emergency regarding her sister and newborn niece. It’s here that the book kind of veers away from being about social media, at least directly, and becomes more about dealing with tragedy and the ability to find hope in the middle of such circumstances.
The contrast between the glib sarcasm and flippancy of social media and the very real tragedy unfolding in the protagonist’s real life doesn’t come across as condemnation; it’s more about ‘looking under the hood’ of life, in order to find the humanity behind the memes and 143-character quips. It’s a slim volume, and I read it fairly quickly, but it still felt like a whole meal. There’s a lot packed into those pages, and I definitely left feeling something profound about the human capacity for dealing with grief. It reminded me of the parade of banal moments I attach to grief in my own life. A friend lost a family member to a tragic accident when we were children, and the main memory I have of the aftermath is, at the funeral, noticing his father’s ears. In high school, a different schoolmate died in an auto accident, and the only memory I have of him alive was also strangely specific: we are sitting on a bench at soccer practice, and he tells me how–after I get my braces off–my teeth will feel extra smooth. I think we latch on to these weirdly specific moments because, especially as children, because the enormity of death defies understanding.
Contrasting flippancy with substance relates to whiskey some pretty obvious ways once you look for it. That whiskey has become synonymous with toughness and raw machismo is a naked marketing ploy. Vodka is more purely alcoholic than whiskey but it gets marketed as something high class and even a bit snooty. Nevertheless, popular distilleries have names that evoke wide open plains, the country life, the smell of leather and pine trees. To whit: ‘Buffalo Trace’, ‘High West’, and this week’s ‘Bulleit Bourbon’. Now, Bulleit is actually named after the founder of the whiskey, not a projectile, but if you think the homonymic qualities of that name have nothing to do with the whiskey’s marketing appeal, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like you to consider purchasing.
I have a complicated relationship with Bulleit myself: it was a popular choice at the bars I worked at, and so I used it in a lot of old fashioneds, and liked the taste more or less. It’s not my favorite, but it’s not the worst either. For a time, however, it was very popular in these bars, and seemed to have a very macho/hipster reputation which started to wear thin on me, to be honest, and so–because it was never my favorite anyway–I stopped drinking it. I felt vindicated when I learned that the queer daughter of Bulleit’s founder was pushed out of the company by her own dad once she came out. So, similar to the contrast between our online selves and our real identities, there’s sort of a connection between this week’s book and my experience with Bulleit Bourbon. Thanks for reading!