No One Is Talking About This

a book review and reflection

On January 1, 2022, I got up, made ginger tea for Derek and coffee for us both and got back in bed to finish the last 64 pages of Patricia Lockwood’s novel No One Is Talking About This. What a lovely place to be, near the end of a great novel, when nothing matters except the exigency of finishing it and having the time and space to do so. A reader friend dropped it off at my house a couple weeks ago, and when I first started it, I could not understand the hype (it was chosen as one of the New York Times top five fiction books of the year). In fact, I didn’t like it at all at first. The narrator is a kind of influencer on “the portal”—i.e., internet—and she’s snarky, hip, and anxious; she refers to herself in the third person as “she”; she comes up with clever phrases that go viral. She pokes fun at herself and the portal, and the novel itself is delivered in short bursts that initially read like witty social media posts. She and the portal world and its memes, tweets, posts, videos, shares, and trends come across as mildly annoying and somewhat vacuous. Which, I realize as I keep reading, is the point. Her cat’s name is Dr. Butthole.

Our enemies!... Had they made us weak with intermittent fasting? Had they wasted our evenings with the detective show that no one could understand? Had they done this to make American novels bad for a time? Were they distracting our anarchists with polyamory and meal replacement drinks so nothing could get done? Had they bloated us with homebrew? Had they made Christianity viable again? Had they brought back snap-crotch bodysuits?

That’s Part One.

Then you come to Part Two.

And everything changes.

Everything changes when her “far mother” texts her: Something has gone wrong, and How soon can you get here?

The narrator takes a flight to Ohio, and finally in the car with her mom, says, “Tell me.” Her mother lays her head against the steering wheel and begins to weep. In the next segment, the narrator is in the hospital holding the hand of her sister who is getting an ultrasound from “the tech.” Everyone is waiting for the baby to breathe, but she won’t. So the narrator plays upbeat music on her phone, which seems to help. Then, “The tech could see everything—the head that was measuring ten weeks ahead of the rest of the body, the asymmetry in the arms and legs, the eyes that would not close…” Her sister is 26 weeks pregnant.  

None of the doctors, nurses, or specialists ever breathed a word about abortion. Because twenty-six weeks was already too late? Because it was Ohio, and the Governor’s pen was constantly hovering over terrible new legislation? Because the hospital was Catholic, and there was a statue of Jesus holding a farm animal in the lobby? They never exactly knew. “Did you read that article…” her sister asked one morning, and immediately she knew which one: a woman who had to fly hundreds of miles to Las Vegas, fight head-down through a churn of protesters, and finally lie down on a table in a paper gown behind six inches of bulletproof glass. “I keep thinking of the protesters,” her sister said. “Spit flying from their mouths. How none of them knew.”

The narrator offers to drive her sister to Las Vegas, but they both know “the journey wouldn’t be safe” and “their parents would never speak to them again.”

“If I were you, honey,” one social worker told her sister, “I might just go out running and see what happened.” They blinked at her. Surely that wasn’t safe? Surely they hadn’t been transported back to 1950s Ireland? Surely no one would advise her, next, to drink a bottle of gin in a hot bath?

But what is wrong with the baby? The doctors tell them: “Everything that could have gone wrong with a baby’s brain went wrong here… The neurons all migrated into isolated pods, where they will never talk to one another.” If the baby lived “for the doctors did not believe she would live,” they did not believe she would live for long.

Then a new law passes in Ohio while all this is happening that makes it a felony to induce a birth before 36 weeks: “The law itself was only a month old: fresh as a newborn, and no one knew whose it was, and naked fear on the doctors’ faces.” She and her father discuss this.  

“Surely there must be exceptions,” her father ventured, the man who had spent his entire life crusading against the exception. His white-hairy hand traveled to his belt, the way it always did when he was afraid. He did not want to live in the world he had made, but when it came right down to it, did any of us?

A full DNA test reveals a one in a billion condition: Proteus syndrome. The narrator translates: “The words they meant were Elephant Man.” But then—after an ethic’s committee signs off on a 35-week delivery, the baby is born.

And everything changes again.

There’s time in the NICU. Amazing nurses. The narrator writes that she “found herself so excited by the baby that she could hardly stand it.” The narrator stays with her sister, helps and helps. Holds the baby. Watches her on the grainy black and white video at the NICU when they can’t be there. The narrator is so swept up in caring for the baby and helping her sister and can “hardly recall her previous life.”

Looking at the baby she sometimes believed that nothing was wrong or could ever go wrong, that they were on a planet together where this is simply what a baby was….“She only knows how to be herself,” they kept repeating to each other.

Her sister and brother-in-law decorate the nursey and bring the baby home from the NICU.

The baby breaks them open. Breaks all of them open.

When the narrator leaves her sister’s months later to go home, her cat, Dr. Butthole, no longer pays attention to her. Her husband tells her: “You were gone so long that Barbara Streisand  became hot to me,” and buries his face in her neck. But she has to go back. Her sister needs her.

Her sister’s freedom had been snatched from her, neat and complete. She did not sleep or shower. Her heartbeat was the beep of monitors. She was tied to the baby, who nevertheless had turned out to be the leafiest shade on earth, towering high above her and almost to the heavens, stirring with little birds…

To watch her sister was not like watching a saint; it was like watching the clear flowing stream the saint was filled with, water that talked, laughed, carried, lifted, and never once uttered an imperfect sound. “How?” she asked her sister once, and her sister stared at her like water and said, “Perfect happiness.”

The baby struggles to breathe. Has more seizures. Gets introduced to a dog for patients that licks her face and arms and legs “as if she were his long-lost owner.” Struggles to breathe even more. Gains no weight, begins to refuse the steady drip of medicines. They take her to the hospital, “even as they understood the hospital meant the end.”

The baby lived six months and one day.

Try not to choke up. The baby will break you open too, Reader.

“I would have done it for a million years,” her sister said, toneless. “I would have gotten up every morning and given her thirteen medicines. There is no relief. I would have done it for all time.” Then told of a bill she had received for $61,000.

I’ve told you the plot of the book, but you should still read the book if you’re inclined. Because it takes a terrifying, devastating, mind- and body-fuck experience and renders it convincingly divine. So if the sister had found the fetal anomaly sooner or lived in a state that did allow late-term abortion… the narrator would have no book and neither she nor her sister nor her sister’s husband would have never experienced that near-devastating loss or learned that deep, true love.

There are plenty of stories of people who chose not to have an abortion and were so glad they didn’t; others simply can’t access one, and might be, as in the narrator’s sister’s case in No One Is Talking About This, forever altered without one regret upon giving birth.

And there are many, many untold stories of women who chose to have abortions and are immensely grateful they could—and did.