Patricia Lockwood first became known to readers both as a poet and as a Twitter persona, noted for her deadpan humor—“@parisreview So is paris any good or not”—and for her surreally comic “sexts,” which portrayed sex as a kind of performance art, often involving cartoon characters or animals. (“A Teenage Turtle takes extreme pleasure from sticking his head in and out of his shell very slowly while a rat watches” was one example; “I play Whac-A-Mole and all the moles let me whac them. They rise up to meet me, they desire nothing more than to be whac” was another.) Lockwood’s memoir, “Priestdaddy,” which came out in 2017 and was awarded the Thurber Prize for American Humor, tells the story of her childhood as the daughter of a Lutheran minister who became an unconventional Catholic priest. The book also chronicles nine months of Lockwood’s adulthood, when she and her husband, Jason Kendall, went to live with her parents in their Midwestern rectory. Her first novel, “No One Is Talking About This,” which was excerpted in The New Yorker, tells the story of a woman who lives very much online, in what she calls “the portal,” until she is pulled back to the real world by the birth of a niece with a lethal genetic syndrome.
We first spoke last October, on Zoom, as part of the 2021 New Yorker Festival, and then again, in January, to catch up on what had happened in the intervening months. Lockwood spoke to me, on Zoom, from her bedroom in Savannah, Georgia. One of her three cats, Fenriz, whom Lockwood had given CBD to help alleviate the stress of the pandemic, yowled occasionally in the background. The following interview, which has been edited and condensed, draws from both of our conversations.
You are a writer of many genres and forms. When you start writing something, what comes first for you, the idea for what you want to write about or the form in which you would like to write it?
It’s neither one. It’s some sort of sentence. It’s sometimes a one-liner, almost approaching a joke or a short vignette. I begin with that, and it becomes clear pretty soon, I think, what I want it to be. Obviously, “No One Is Talking About This” was going to be a novel, because I needed to tell lies in it. Obviously, “Priestdaddy” was going to be a memoir, because it was about my priest dad. The poetry is poetry; the essays are essays. So you do know fairly quickly what something is.
The first book you wrote, which was not published, was a novel.
Yes, yes, old school.
So was that the first genre that it occurred to you to write?
Well, I wrote poetry long before that. I knew that there were contests of varying legitimacy and quality that you could send a book of poetry to. I don’t know how I knew this. But I was always working on one, and pages would sort of fly in and fly out again. And that goes back pretty far—I want to say to the time that I was fourteen or so. Certainly, by the time I was sixteen, I had what I thought of as a book on the back of the stove, like a witch’s cauldron that’s bubbling.
I don’t really remember a time that I wasn’t working not just on poems but on larger projects. And it’s strange because I knew then, too, that I could make up characters, but I couldn’t make anything happen to them. I could see these people, but I could never imagine situations. It was sort of how I felt in my own life. I understood that I was a figure standing in a particular place with all of space surrounding me. But I did not understand how people got from point A to point B, how they made decisions about anything, how they knew what they wanted to eat for lunch.
But, yes, when I was about nineteen, I did start to write a novel. And I wrote it very quickly, and I talked about it in interviews as a point of pride that I wrote it so quickly. It was called “The History of Opposable Thumbs,” because that was the sort of title that people used at that time, and I thought that just sounded really good. I think you could probably identify a lot of the themes that I use now in the book. But it was terrible. It was world-class freaking atrocious.
So what happened between that and whatever you wrote next to make you not atrocious?
I mean, maybe parts of it weren’t that atrocious; maybe the sentences weren’t that atrocious. But here’s the problem: I felt that there had to be incest in it, because that was just something that was happening at that time. So this novel was, by definition, going to be atrocious because it had this incest plotline. So probably the main thing that went into making me not terrible is that I just removed the incest.
Well, assuming you’re not going to dig that back up again and rework it—
I could. Never say never. After you have a first novel that has been critically praised—which, for some reason, “No One Is Talking About This” has—you do get a little bit, like, panicky about what you’re going to do next. So, if I can’t think of anything, maybe I’ll rework the incest novel.
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Do you feel that your style changes from genre to genre? When you’re writing a poem, do you kind of put on your I’m-a-poet-now hat—
Hat, yes.
Or wig.
Wig! It’s totally a wig. The weird thing is that I feel that I do. I feel that I sound different across genres, and I feel, also, that I sound different from era to era, but I’m always running up against things I’ve written, even when I was a kid, and I sound exactly the same. It’s freaky. The only difference, I think, is that I do have what I’d say is my church tone, and then my “Saturday Night Live” tone. And I sort of have to figure out how much of each to incorporate.
When you started writing poetry, what gave you the idea? What made you think you would be a poet?
I mean, who knows why people get that grandiose idea, right? You have to be a little bit of a megalomaniac. I think it probably had to do with L. M. Montgomery’s lesser-known masterwork, “Emily of New Moon,” as well as the sequel “Emily Climbs.” Those were both books about a sort of deranged girl with very black hair and skin like moonlight—it was emphasized multiple times—who has something wrong in her brain that makes her write poetry all the time. She experiences something called “the flash,” which is a moment when the veil of the heaven rends and shows her a glimpse of what’s beyond. And I thought, Why not take her as a model? I’m also very pale. My hair is pretty dark. I think that I can do it.
Also, I felt I understood poems because they almost always involved a kind of turn, that line that sheds its clothes and makes a movement that’s not even mechanical but is like the movement of a human form turning around and revealing something. I thought I could do that. I have that turn—and I identify it as being something I got from my mom, who made puns. I think I recognized at the time that that was a linguistic skill, but I did not respect it as much as I should have until much later.
How did you come across the L. M. Montgomery books?
I’m not sure. I mean, “Anne of Green Gables” makes its way into a lot of girls’ hands. “Emily of New Moon” much less so. I think that I had a tendency to read down rabbit holes, so if I read “Anne of Green Gables” and recognized something in that, I would seek out everything else I could find by that person. If she mentioned a book, say, in one of her journals, something like “The Story of an African Farm,” I would seek that out and it would just lead me to everything. I found a copy of “The Loved One,” by Evelyn Waugh, when I was really young. How did I recognize the quality in these things? But there is something almost tangible, so I went by feel. It was obsessiveness, I think, and a sort of persistence in tracking down these people who were interesting to me.
Were you reading any poetry at the time?
Yes. I actually had a pretty great book that my uncle had given me. He was my art uncle, and, one Christmas, he gave me this fantastic poetry book that was, like, poems inspired by great American art works. It had William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, all the big guys. I’d been reading poetry beforehand, always in the context of anthologies, and what I could find in the library or on the shelves at the Barnes & Noble.
Rilke was very big for me—I just picture these enormous angels, as tall as cathedrals, and the arches are their wings. And one of those angels is just reaching a toe down and poking you on the forehead with it. I had the Stephen Mitchell translation of the “Duino Elegies.” And I think I already had the vocabulary for someone like Rilke. It was a vocabulary that was bigger than what I was applying it to, which, at that point in my life, was a more localized and restrictive religious mindset. But the ideas and the words—I always saw the words. I saw shapes in the words, and I saw images. And he made sense to me from the very beginning. Again, maybe something about his turns and about his uses of objects. He just felt like a very congruent spirit to me. And he was a huge influence in terms of getting the flesh in there; you always feel that someone’s about to be shot full of arrows in a Rilke poem.
Did you have other early influences that were as important to you?
In terms of influences, there was also Wallace Stevens. I was, like, There’s a freaking jar on a hill and the jar is making everything surround it. That was my shit. That was my whole thing. I was, like, This is a construction I understand. This is also a lens I understand. It’s a lens I can apply. So, if you look structurally at my poems in “Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals,” there’s a very strong Wallace Stevens component, where my jar is making the hills surround it, if you will.
My early years of reading were extremely idiosyncratic. I taught myself to read when I was just about three, I think. And I read things that I liked over and over and over again, until I knew them by heart. We had a couple of books in the house that I was really fascinated by, that I somehow understood were good. One of them was “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” and the other one was this great Lore Segal children’s book called “Tell Me a Mitzi.” I wouldn’t read her novels and stories until I was an adult, but I knew as a child that there was something in this book; there was some sort of aura about it. It was one of those books that you just can’t ever really get to the bottom of. There were even one or two Berenstain Bears books that I felt were like that—the one where Brother gets in trouble. I defy anyone to go pick up “Trouble at School” and see if there’s not something mysterious in that Berenstain Bears book.
I did seek things out in libraries. My school libraries were very formative, in that regard. I had a really good high-school library, because it was, like, the radical-nun high school. And I found a lot of things there that I didn’t have access to at home. It was that time when you would just read anything—you would just wander into whatever section and end up picking up some novel about gay men or something, and you’re, like, eleven, and you think, Yes, sure, this applies to my life. And that’s how you end up forming some sort of taste, I think. You do have to have a period of being totally indiscriminate before you can form taste.
What was the reading life in your household like? Were your parents reading fiction, poetry, anything like that?
My mom—I don’t know if my mom can read. She did finally read “Priestdaddy,” but only by listening to the audiobook, because I read it, and she was very pleased by the fact that she got to listen to me in a car uninterrupted for, like, four hours. But it’s questionable whether she can read.
My father reads exclusively heavy theological tomes and submarine books. It was, like, Thomas Aquinas, and then it was Tom Clancy. Those were the only two kinds of books in the home.
I’m wondering about the genre of submarine books.
I don’t know what that says about me, right, that that is my lineage, my reading lineage. I think I would pick them up from time to time, and it was, like, the men were so nervous. They were in this sardine can, and they were so freaking nervous. My dad had been in the submarine service, and those were probably his happiest days, because the nervousness would alternate with big shipments of steaks, and then they would all pig out and eat those. So I think those books were tied to his happiest times. And when you’re not reading Thomas Aquinas, maybe you just want to give the brain a break. Maybe you just want to chill out for a little bit in your underwear and read about those guys being nervous on a submarine.
Do you have guilty-pleasure reading?
I don’t know that I do. I mean, I read things that are odd, but I don’t feel, if I read fantasy, that that is an embarrassment or something that I should hide, or, like, candy or something. But if, on a sentence-to-sentence level, something is bad, then there probably just isn’t a chance that I’m going to read it.
Can you tell me a little more about your art uncle?
He was a painter, and he showed me the practice. He had a studio that was full of good light. And he was the one who did the sort of “housewifely” duties. He took care of the kids and he shopped and he cooked and he cleaned.
I stole books from him. I’m sitting here with his copy of Jean Shepherd’s “The Ferrari in the Bedroom,” and Jean Shepherd was a huge formative influence on me, particularly in the region of humor. And I stole “Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories: And Other Disasters” from my art uncle’s bookshelf.
He also had fantastic taste in movies. I’d watch these movies that he would borrow from the local library. He really demonstrated to me that the library was a thing that could be used, that you could discern its inner workings and make it work for you. And he would put on a Robert Altman movie or something like that, and I always hated them at the time. He would play “The Hudsucker Proxy,” and I would think, This is a piece of shit. And then you’re an adult and you think, No, that movie is not a piece of shit. But I think he was always a little bit irritated by us kids, which I probably would also be if I had a bunch of kids running around my house, stealing all my best books from me.
Was your aunt also artistically inclined?
No. I mean, she was lyrically beautiful. All my mother’s sisters were lyrically beautiful, but she ended up working as a sort of soap-business queen at P. & G. So, very practically minded. Actually, there are lots of female engineers on my mom’s side of the family. My mom had some interest in being an inventor for a while. She would invent household things. I believe one of her greatest triumphs was a Bounce dispenser, because she was really upset at the way the Bounce sheets always came out of the box, and she invented this Bounce dispenser using, like, a butter dish. She showed it to us really proudly. And I feel like it should have been more awe-inspiring to us at the time, but it was a Bounce dispenser, so it was hard to get excited about it. But, yes, my mother and her sisters were the practical ones. I didn’t inherit a whole lot of that.
I wanted to ask a bit about the places you grew up and how important you think those are to your writing.
I have been asked before, and sometimes people do want you to say that you’re a regional writer, but I don’t think I am. I mean, I wrote extensively about St. Louis in “Priestdaddy.” And I think it was important that I did that, but I probably wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t had to go back through my past and be, like, Yes, people do live in places. I’m not the type necessarily who’s taking a beautiful regional walk and, like, knowing things about my area.
Do you get inspired by the physical world around you, or do you write into a different space that’s not where you are?
A totally different space. I’m in the bubble. Yes. And I’ve tried to get inspired by nature and it’s just, oh, my God, the air is so hard, the sun is so bright, and there are little flying things. You go outside and you start to feel like there are bugs all over you. I would love to be one of those people who could wander through a graveyard and get ideas. But, no, I do have to be the bubble boy and almost completely insulate myself.
Going back to when you were starting to write poetry or a little bit later, five or six years ago: you had, basically, the first-ever viral poem, “Rape Joke,” which tells the story of a rape and revolves around the notion of whether one can find comedy in that situation, where there is none. How did that poem go viral? And did the response to it surprise you?
Well, I don’t know if it’s actually the first poem that went viral—surely, there was something beforehand—but it was in the early days of that sort of thing. I was surprised by it because you don’t think about poems going viral, whatsoever. I was living with my parents in a Catholic rectory at the time that the poem was published. (This was the period that I would later make immortal in the memoir “Priestdaddy.”) So, yes, any broadcast from the outside world, any acknowledgement that people actually read poetry, coming to me at that time would have been surprising. It was an enormous groundswell. And, mostly, I just remember the sense of personal discomfort that I was with my parents at that time and how that really did make me feel like a teen-ager again.
Had they seen the poem before you published it?
No. My mom read it on Facebook. That’s not how you want that to happen. Oh, yes.
Part of the poem says, “The rape joke is that for the next five years all you did was write, and never about yourself, about anything else, about apples on the tree, about islands, dead poets and the worms that aerated them, and there was no warm body in what you wrote, it was elsewhere.” Since that time, you’ve become known specifically for writing about yourself. You wrote a memoir. Your novel draws on your life. Were there five years when you couldn’t write about yourself?
Yes, that’s true, but I think it was also true that I never wrote about myself before then, either. I didn’t have the sense that the self was really a worthy subject for the sort of thing that I wanted to do. The newer autofiction and the Knausgaard-type books, people like Rachel Cusk, had not really broken onto the scene yet. So I don’t know that I had the concept of there being a literary way to anatomize my experience. Really, I just thought that poems were about trees.
And also “Rape Joke” was really at the forefront of my realizing that my sense of humor was fairly confrontational. So it wasn’t just that I was learning to write about myself; it was that I was learning to use my sense of humor in a way that was almost a weapon.
Almost every bio of you that I’ve read says, at some point, “Patricia Lockwood is noted for her Twitter sexts.” I feel that Twitter was perhaps where you were working out that sense of humor and the confrontational aspect of it. Do you think that’s accurate?
Maybe. I would say that the sexts were sometimes confrontational in their tone or their material, but, really, it was about just being absolutely surreal. And, of course, they came on the heels of Anthony Weiner’s sexting nightmare. And it was sort of a way of addressing that. I never talked about the news in a straightforward way. But, really, the period of time where I was writing those was quite short. I think it’s just one of those charismatic facts that people like to include in their bios because it helps them feel they have a handle on me or the sort of writing that I do. A lot of the time, they’ll talk about the sexts being really raunchy, but they’re not raunchy. The things in those sexts you can’t even physically do. They’re about cartoons, cereal mascots, or Garfield and Ziggy. There is no, like, P. and V. in the world of my sexts.
There are just dolphins. . . .
Yes, and they’re, like, jumping through hoops of flame, and that’s the sex; it’s not anything like normal sex. So it’s like a willful misreading, right? You want that to be the sort of writing I’m doing, or the sort of person I am. But it’s, in reality, much weirder than that.
But your Tweets are also really funny. They have the humor that’s a big part of your writing. Twitter is a place where you can use the one-liner aspect of that.
Yes, and that goes back a long way, to my childhood, because I had this really volatile father, that submarine-novel-and-Thomas-Aquinas-reading father, who would also blow up at any moment and freak out over very small things. And there were five of us kids, and when that’s the situation you band together. And when the anger comes out of nowhere and is sometimes over something very tiny, it is funny, and there has to be some way for you to communicate that among yourselves. So I think that the sense of humor that I developed is a shared family sense of humor. I think that’s why it’s so prevalent in “Priestdaddy,” particularly. This is what we developed to deal with that situation in my family home.
Do your siblings still have that sense of humor?
Yes, we all do still. It’s almost hysterical—like we exist on the verge of hysteria at all times. Something really absurd was always happening in our household, something very much out of proportion to more normal human behavior. I think a lot of people thought that there were episodes in “Priestdaddy” that were exaggerated, when in reality it was very much toned down. People were, like, “Everything’s in this book.” And I was, like, “Oh, no, there could have been so many more things in that book.” If I gave you the full download, I would seem like a person of almost Jane Austen-level propriety in “Priestdaddy”! When you have a family situation like that, I think what most people do is just sort of ignore it, right? Or completely normalize it. But, with us, we would turn to each other and take the snapshot of what was happening—like a deadpan look where you’re framing something and saying, “This is happening. This is not what typically happens on a typical day. This is not what normal people do.” I think of it as a kind of recognition. A lot of times, it wasn’t like we were telling jokes. We were just repeating something my father had said or something he had done, in only a slightly heightened way—because it didn’t really need to be heightened.
Can you think of a particular time when that happened?
Probably the Stobart. My mother had gotten a huge and beautiful ship painting for my father, because ships were his passion in life. And it was painted by a man named John Stobart, and she got it for him, I think, for their anniversary, as a surprise. And the idea was that we would hang it over their bed, and we would all surprise him when he came home. The painting in question was almost as large as the bed itself. We did this while he was off saying Mass one day. And we were all, like, crouching downstairs outside of the bedroom. When he comes home, he goes into the bedroom. I think he completes a change of clothes, even, and he doesn’t notice a thing. This goes on for almost, like, an hour that he does not notice the enormous ship painting. And we finally start to dissolve into giggles, because it’s really very funny. The ship is so fucking huge. And he was, like, “What the hell is wrong with you? Why are you laughing?” He didn’t like to be laughed at, obviously. He’s freaking out—he’s starting to scream a little bit. And we point, and he turns to see this enormous ship painting on the wall that is going to be there for the rest of their marriage and probably his life, and he just totally lost his stack. But we couldn’t even respond to his anger. We were in hysterics, just dissolving into a puddle of, like, a single Lockwood organism. We weren’t even people anymore. While, at the same time, he’s continuing to scream at the top of his lungs about how—what, do we think he’s stupid if he doesn’t recognize that there’s a big ship on his wall? So, now, even if you just say the word “Stobart,” it’s a kind of shorthand that will send us into this state, because, again, this is not the usual outcome of a nice gift that a wife gets for her loving husband.
Right. Well, you kids just had to mess it up.
Yes. We fucked it up. We fucked up the gift. And I wonder, sometimes, did he remember later—did he ever look at the painting and be, like, I’m an asshole. But I honestly don’t think he did. I think he probably looked at it and thought, What a beautiful ship.
Is that the kind of thing you could ask him?
Probably not. I don’t know that he would understand the question. He wouldn’t be offended. Again, he’s not like other creatures. He is totally, totally one of a kind. One of the losses, the more heartfelt losses, of seeing your father or other men of that age become more and more conservative in the current world that we live in is that they lose a sort of eccentricity. It gets flattened into these overarching buzzwords and paranoias and ideas that they all have. When, in reality, there was a time when a lot of these guys were one of a kind, you know? And then, after a while, they’re just one of them.
Yes. That’s one of the major evils that have been perpetrated on our culture.
Well, let’s see. I mean, it sits in the top four hundred.
The homogenization of bad guys.
Yes, of old assholes. That’s right.
At least they each used to be assholes in a different way.
I know, I can’t believe these men are lost to us now.
Do you like to read humor? Do you go to comedy shows?
Oh, my God, if I ever went to a standup show, I would die. If there is a standup scene, I leave my body. I can’t explain it. I love sketch comedy, but standup I simply can’t watch. I do read humor, but mostly older humor, like pre-1980, even. Again, Jean Shepherd is a very, very big influence of mine. And I don’t think a lot of people read his books anymore, which is a shame.
Yes. Humor can be very much of its time.
No, it doesn’t age well at all. I think, more than other disciplines, you learn humor at the knee of some weird uncle, right, with everything that entails. So, yes, it’s the records that comedians were listening to. It’s the stories that were handed down, with all their intended prejudices. Humor is, in more than one sense, a hand-me-down. You inherit it from people.
You obviously didn’t inherit yours from your father.
No, he has never been funny on purpose in his life.
Going back to the idea of drawing on your own life, in memoir, of course, but also in your novel: in “No One Is Talking About This,” you deal with a real situation in which your newborn niece had Proteus syndrome. Why fictionalize that story? You had just written a memoir. You were comfortable in that genre. Why take this particular situation and make it a novel?
The short answer is that I had already been writing that novel for, like, two years, and it was too late to give it up. And there were things that I felt were too personal. It’s true that the section with the protagonist’s niece—that is my niece. That is her personality put into the book largely intact, and I wanted it that way. But there were things surrounding her that I still felt the need to fictionalize. I wouldn’t, for instance, want my father as he truly was in that book. I had a cop in there, instead. But, yes, this novel breaks directly in the middle. Up to that point, the protagonist is largely thinking about the Internet, how she feels herself to be trapped there, inside what she calls “the portal.” And then there is this sudden jolt of awareness when she’s yanked into the real world. I like this framework—there was a fictional reality going on, and in the midst of it was something real. So maybe it is a hybrid.
I always think about Barbara Comyns talking about the birth scene in “Our Spoons Came from Woolworths.” She said that was just as it was. There are some things that are so real that they have, like, the blood and the small hairs on them in a way that you can’t fictionalize, so you just put them in.
What you’d been writing for two years was the first half of the book on life in the portal, right? Did you, at that point, have a plan for where the novel was going to go?
Yes. It was going to be in outer space, in another world. I had a whole frame story worked out, but a lot of the time my initial ideas for novels, or books of any kind, really—they don’t turn out the way I think they’re going to. It goes back to that whole issue of, I can make up the Barbies, but I don’t know how they’re supposed to move. Or other factors come into play—and, in this case, it was real life.
Do you think you would ever go back to the original idea that you had for the second half of the book?
Yes. I mean, I keep it to the side, and there’s another book that I have conceived, and it maybe has more in common with that. That one is more fantastical, but I don’t know if that’s the way it’s going to actually turn out. I always have these very fantastical ideas, and then, when I start writing them, they seem more like fables. They don’t seem to have any life in them, and they turn into something else instead.
Did the first part of “No One Is Talking About This” start as an essay?
No, it started as a novel, but I did deliver a huge chunk of it at the British Museum for the London Review of Books lecture series. And it was published as an essay. But I’d been writing it for a really long time at that point. Well, it seemed like a long time to me. In Internet years, it was like a thousand decades. So the novel was already going, and, when I was asked to do this lecture, I was, like, Oh, I think I can just take all the Internet parts—and, boom, it’s an essay.
So, at that point, it was interpreted as an essay, but it was still written in the third person, right?
Yes. And, at one point, the character even had a name. She was called Rachel, and she was called Rachel because I sort of got the idea of the sensitization—this sense that something was in the air, that your skin was very receptive to these vibrations—one afternoon when I was reading a Rachel Ingalls novel called “Mrs. Caliban.” And it’s strange, because there are resonances in that book that, at the time, I didn’t realize were going to be there. The protagonist in “Mrs. Caliban” has lost a child. And I didn’t know that that kind of loss would be part of my novel. That there were things in that book that would come true in my life. So, for a while, I was calling the protagonist Rachel because it was comforting to me to sort of have this company, this person who would notice life, maybe, in a similarly dissociated way.
It seems as though reading is a very immersive experience for you.
Yes, almost psychotically so. I don’t think I read normally at all. I was having a conversation with Sheila Heti about this the other day, and she was, like, “How do you write your reviews?” And I was, like, “Man, if I talk about it, it does sound really, really crazy.” I can go through an entire book not even knowing what the characters’ names are, but I feel myself strongly to be inside their bodies and to be sort of meeting the writer on this plane above it all, where I’m speaking to them directly. So it’s almost mystical, actually, Deborah. And I’ll just be there with my notebook, this giant Moleskine, writing everything down. And, I don’t know, feeling a very, very strong sense of communion with a book. I don’t think most people write that way or read that way, but I also think that most people come out of their reading with some sense of the basic plot of the book, which I don’t always. If it’s a mystery, I don’t know who did it. I can’t retain any sort of knowledge of plot from reading to reading, but the sense of the bodies, of being inside those, and of communicating with the writer—those stay with me from reading to reading.
Is your first reading of a book a kind of get-it-over-with thing? Read the whole thing through, so that you can then come back to your favorite moments?
Well, this is very percipient. I wouldn’t describe it that way, but actually I experience a great discomfort when I’m reading or watching something for the first time. I think my father must have been like this, too, because he watched movies over and over and over, just dozens and dozens of times, every day for months. And he did the same thing with books. So I think that there was a physical discomfort in encountering a sort of new sequence of events. And, once I was in the groove of it, then I was released and I could read it over and over again, paying very particular attention to the things that I paid attention to.
That must be only if it’s a good book.
No! Not always, that’s what’s so crazy. It happens, really, with anything, and it might make me too lax in my judgments at times, because I can feel it about a book that is bad or about a book that I feel tenderness toward because it is a failure. I feel very tender toward failures. So I don’t know if my great organ lies in my judgment. I think it’s more in my readerly empathy.
That’s interesting, because, in a way, the portal, in the first half of your novel, is something that the protagonist is bodily immersed in—is living a life inside of. Was that what Twitter was for you at some point in your life?
Yes, it was. Not anymore. There was an early day where the immersion was very, very pleasurable. It was almost ecstatic. But during the Trump years—actually, even after he’d just got the nomination—you felt that you had to be on there every day—like, 8 a.m., at your post—otherwise, you couldn’t control what was going to happen that day. If you didn’t know about it, then it would go on without you, beyond your control. I think a lot of people, particularly in that time, felt that they were standing sentinel, which is, in many ways, a wasteful feeling. And that lent to the idea that we were stuck there, that we really could not get out. So I began the novel in spring of 2016, that year.
What do you think Twitter did to your writing style, if anything?
I don’t know that it did anything specifically. I think I always sounded this way. There was that sort of frivolity or irreverence, with these elements of confrontation—that goes back to the very earliest genesis of my writing. So I think that it was just one of those things that slotted into Twitter really well. What I did feel, after a while being on Twitter, was that a joke would, more often than it did before, present itself to me in, like, a pre-prepared form, a preconceived form that was not always my own. That I didn’t like. When you were in that place and it automatically occurred to you to formulate your joke in a way that people had been formulating jokes—like, “New Garfield just dropped.” Or people would have a kid, and they would be, like, “New baby just dropped.” And that started to concern me—it was, like, O.K., but you just had a child, and you’re talking about it in Internetspeak. That is what I wanted to write about in “No One Is Talking About This,” that feeling.
Again, early on, with something like Twitter, there’s this sort of ecstatic component to this. It feels incredible, it feels like you’re on fire, like you’re part of this communal creative fire. But then, after a while, it becomes rigid or concretized. And you think, Well, if I weren’t formulating it this way, how would I be saying it? And then you start to really freak out.
And then how do you cope with the transition from Twitter life to real life? You’ve met people in person whom you knew only as their Twitter handles. How does that experience play out in your brain?
Oh, it’s fine! I met my husband on the Internet. It goes way back for me. I love to meet Twitter people in real life. And it happens in the craziest places and at the craziest times. During lockdown, I went to get a juice from a place on Tybee Island called Java & Juice, and I was wearing a mask. And I was walking out the door with my big juice, and this guy looks at me, and he says, “Are you Tricia Lockwood from Twitter?” And I was, like, “Yes, but I have no idea how you’re getting this.” And he was, like, “I was the first person to respond to your Paris Review tweet.” And it was incredible! First of all, that it had even happened, that he could see who I was, and that we were having this moment, that it was brought into the real world.
I think you underestimate how uniquely recognizable you are from the nose up.
Oh, is that true? Is it the hair?
Yes.
I think if I had done a tour with “No One Is Talking About This,” that would have happened to me a lot. I would have gotten to speak to people I had only met on the Internet. There’s a bit at the beginning of the book, where the protagonist meets this person whose Diaryland blog she had read, like, eons and eons ago. And he comes to one of her readings. And, on Diaryland, you didn’t know what anyone looked like. There weren’t pictures. You were just reading about this guy’s record collection and his love of vindaloo. And then suddenly he was there, and it was this very fragile, sort of holy moment.
When an excerpt from the novel ran in The New Yorker, you did a Q. & A. for us, in which you said, “The Internet represented, to me, a place of safety.” And that idea is surprising to me, because, for a lot of people, the Internet is a place of unsafety. What is it that makes you feel safe?
Well, what felt unsafe to me in my life was not knowing things, not knowing the things that everyone else knew. I was raised in a sort of isolation chamber, where the norms were not even reaching me, let alone, like, the fine erudite things. All the things that I felt I should know—I felt that I was in constant search for that, a physical search, my body was yearning and straining toward all this knowledge. And when my father installed the home computer in my house, probably during the early to mid-nineties, I could find those things out for the first time. And that was safety to me. It was the place where I could go to be educated.
And now, as you said in that interview, it has become “the place where I ended up seeing the pic of a pig with poop on its balls like ten thousand times over a period of ten years.”
Ten thousand times! I forgot that I said that. That was actually when I was very ill post-covid.
You caught it very early, right?
Yes, I caught it very early, and I think I got a massive dose of it right in the face on a plane. I had flown to Harvard to give a lecture about the Internet, basically the same lecture that I gave at the British Museum. This was, like, March 3, 2020. People weren’t cancelling things at that point, and they also weren’t wearing masks. So I did this incredibly stupid thing, it turned out. And, on the plane ride back, there was a guy who was coughing and coughing and coughing. He must have been at the Biogen conference, which seeded all those cases up and down the Northeast. So, yes, I got it, and my first manifestations were neurological. I didn’t develop a cough until much later. It was like the fictional pathways in my brain were set on fire, and I was experiencing movies, television, books, all of that as real. I was watching “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and designing my room on the Enterprise. I decided that my husband, who was equally ill at that time, was faking it, and then I thought he had “man covid,” and it seemed like a battle of the sexes. No one knew at that point that any of this could be covid-related. And then I went through the more normal physical stuff. At that point, of course, you weren’t going to the hospital, so I was just riding it out at home. After a couple of weeks, I did get better, and I was flying for about six weeks. And then I got hit with the post-covid stuff.
And that changed reading for you?
It was horrifying. It was like there was a total discontinuity between what my eyes were seeing and my brain’s reception of it. I almost experienced it as a rupture in time, or an injury to my sense of time. My eyes worked, and my brain would catch things a second or two later, but they weren’t working congruently anymore. And this just lasted forever. And, the whole time, I was still trying to write these in-depth essays for the London Review of Books. It was very difficult, almost to a torturous degree. The things that helped in the end: microdosing mushrooms, perfect; and then it turned out that I had a very low Vitamin D level, so, when I started supplementing, it improved a lot.
And—this is very, very big news—I can read normally again as of Thanksgiving! When this happened, I was so ecstatic. It had been so difficult to try to continue the life that I have always lived, which is to wake up in the morning and read. I mean, it felt like I was dragging a plow. I was reading things over and over again, three, four, or five times, just to be able to comprehend them. To have it suddenly returned was indescribable. And the first thing I wanted to do was to rediscover how I read when I was a child. And that was to take a stack of books to my bed and read the cherished chapters in each of them. Like the chapter in “Little Women” where Meg goes to Vanity Fair.
Do you think that the experience changed the way you think about words and the way you write?
Yes, although I always was a person who read by the unit—and not even the unit of a sentence, it was more like syllables. A lot of the time, I would have the book this close to my face, when I was a kid, moving it back and forth. It was almost verging on a learning disability. So it’s not like you could have broken down the components for me any more than they already had been.
Possibly you’ve had covid all your life.
I have proto-covid! Yes, it’s true, though. I think any attention issues or spectrum issues that I previously had—they got turned up like ten times.
In keeping with your genre-hopping, are you working on short stories now?
I am, yes. And they’re based on the crazy notebooks I kept during covid, because my perceptions had become so strange and had been turned up so high, but my writing just kept going. It became very interesting to me once I got my brain back more. So the stories will be delineated as based only on the things that I wrote in that period. Basically, there’s no regular Tricia coming in. It’s all dark Tricia. It can be like my diary of madness or something like that.
I have one more question for you: What is it about Garfield?
I just love his chunky little body and the fact that nothing happens to him in his life. There’s just so much text there, like: What is this monster cat, and what is he saying about our lives? He eats so much lasagna. What the hell is going on with Jon? What’s going on with Odie, secondarily? Jon’s past, his background, the farm that he comes from, does he seem like a farm-type man? Did it affect him to drink the cum? If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you should look it up after this. Do we know how Jon found Garfield? Did he go to the S.P.C.A.? Did he have a traumatic past? There’s so much to be investigated with Garfield that I am getting furious, almost, trying to talk about him right now and cram it all in there. Also, he was merchandised all over our clothes. I have a mug in my cabinet right now that has Garfield on it. He’s ever present for us, almost as if he were a cat in the family home of the world. And we resented that in many ways and, in other ways, he was our own.
You know, you could write the Garfield backstory and it could become the truth.
I’d write a really serious backstory for him. I wouldn’t write something light. I would write the trauma plot for Garfield.
There’s a story for your new collection.
Yes, it sounds good. It actually sounds really good.
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