Patricia Lockwood's Infinite Scroll

The Twitter-famous poet’s first novel, No One Is Talking About This, moves between the body in space and the mind online.

- By Joanne McNeil. Photograph by Pari Dukovic

The Internet deprogrammed Patricia Lockwood. It didn’t happen all at once. Raised in the Catholic Church, Lockwood spent the early years of her life absorbing her parents’ anti-abortion beliefs and activist language about the “Holocaust of infants.” But when she started visiting anti-abortion activist websites in the aughts when she was in her early 20s, she was put off by the treacly graphics and coarse design— how could they be serious? These facts can’t be real, she remembers thinking then. These statistics have to be fake because there’s this little dancing child graphic in the corner of the page or there’s a rose that’s slowly losing its petals. These websites destabilized something inside her, she said; they “opened a crack” for her to reevaluate what she had been taught.

At 38, Lockwood describes herself generationally as “between the books and the ether.” She remembers a time before the internet while still being young enough to immerse herself in it as it was developing— young enough that it could help set her life in motion. Online is where, at age 19, Lockwood met the man she would marry at age 21. It’s where she published her first writing and found her first readers through early diary blogs and poetry forums. And it’s where she uncovered the evidence she needed to shake her family’s anti-abortion stance for good: She came across infertility blogs on which women posted testimonies about what it was like to terminate their pregnancies in the third trimester. “This is the bogeyman scenario my parents talked about,” she said. But she could see that these women “really, really want to be parents.”