The internet, which she coyly refers to as “the portal”, is, for her, life itself: a place where she is perpetually suspended between amusement and horror. Her mind is a sprawling memory palace of ass, in each of whose chambers has been installed a gold toilet. The protagonist is living with the effects of irony poisoning. Lockwood’s observations of the affective reality of the 'portal', the skittering triviality of its denizens, is both ardent and appalled (Though she initially came to prominence on Twitter, Lockwood’s renown is a lot more deserved than her fictional avatar’s: in 2013, her extraordinarily powerful poem “The Rape Joke” went viral, and in 2017 she published an acclaimed comic memoir, Priestdaddy.) When we meet her, the tweet in question, “ Can a dog be twins?”, has “recently reached the stage of penetration where teenagers posted the cry-face emoji at her”. Like Lockwood, she is a writer who came to be celebrated for her good tweets she is invited to cities all over the world to speak about “the new communication, the new slipstream of information”. Its nameless protagonist is, recognisably, a sparsely fictionalised embodiment of the same voice, with the same basic problems. Lockwood’s debut novel, No One Is Talking About This, is in some ways a more substantial attempt to answer the question posed by the essay. The ass will take up residence in my mind. Of her efforts to reclaim some mental space from the endless swirling absurdity of online life, she wrote: “If I look at a phone first thing the phone becomes my brain for the day If I open up Twitter and the first thing I see is the president’s weird bunched ass above a sand dune as he swings a golf club I am doomed. The piece was an attempt to reckon with the damage done to a creative mind by years of excessive exposure to the internet. I n 2018, the American writer Patricia Lockwood published an essay entitled “How Do We Write Now?”.

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