I immediately got on with this. Maybe it’s because I’m a “geriatric” millennial (probably exactly the ‘sweet spot’ age for this book, tbh), but this language just made sense to me. More than making sense, I often found the prose work to be a rare cadence and diction that creates a reading flow state.

It is also perfect form for the story it’s telling. We follow an Extremely Online woman who became famous for a one-time innocuous tweet, but then became so incredibly enmeshed in the culture that the Portal—which is used as a shorthand for interacting with anything social media—becomes as real as real life. If not more real. Hyper real. And her husband, not online at all, inadvertently acts as a grounding mechanism she may not know she needs.

By having to explain what is funny or rage inducing or otherwise ranks as the ‘news’ of the day, she’s forced to contextualize it outside of the online space.

In the later half of the book it shifts it’s insightful exploration further straddling the online and the real, when the woman becomes pregnant, and her perspective necessarily shifts.

No One Is Talking About This was surprisingly affecting for me. I found it witty and biting and even hilarious sometimes. Especially the many in-jokes of the Internet that simply do not translate when you try to explain them IRL. It’s a book written by someone who is actually on social media; a rare thing, somehow, for a book on the subject.

It tackles large emotions and topics with ease, and it does all this in a way I could so relate to that I didn’t really find the transition from first half to the later jarring. I saw most reviews feeling like it was completely different. Almost two separate books. Perhaps it depends heavily upon your own relationship to the Portal? I felt everything followed logically to the text. Even inevitably, perhaps. Our parasocial, simultaneously sweet and sour relationships with all things Online chronicles many a milkshake duck; both in the past and oncoming, in our (near) future.