“You can’t really be on the internet in the same way,” she explained. Lockwood stepped further and further away from the internet as she spent more and more time with her sister and her niece, Lena, to whom her novel is dedicated, and who died when she was six months old. In 2019, Lockwood’s sister discovered, late in her pregnancy, that her baby had Proteus syndrome, a rare and debilitating genetic disorder. And what she kept finding as she did so, she told me, was that “real life just erupted… time and time again” into everything else she was doing-including into all the time she was spending online. The success, both critical and commercial, of Priestdaddy-it was named one of the ten best books of the year by the New York Times, among other accolades-meant Lockwood suddenly had a different platform from which not only to write, but also to perform, to live she was touring the world, speaking to larger and larger audiences, spinning and spinning and spinning, scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. Its success, though, was not quite so based on its relatability-few other people outside the Lockwood family know what it’s like to grow up with a Catholic priest for a father, after all. Lockwood’s 2017 memoir, Priestdaddy, offers a similar sensibility and crystalline sentence-to-sentence beauty, as does her other work, along with an ability to straddle the sacred and profane with ease.

The inclination to share “Rape Joke” as soon as it had been read was no doubt due, in part, to its feeling of innate familiarity to so many of its readers. “It’s a very poetic punishment for me, and probably a good way for me to end my online career.” For a while, Lockwood-whose debut novel, No One Is Talking about This, is narrated by a woman who is, at its start, Extremely Online-could barely even hold her phone. “I used to be able to scroll until I couldn’t feel my fingertip.” But now, she can’t scroll at all. “I actually feel a fiery, burning sensation,” Lockwood told me over the phone recently. Since Patricia Lockwood contracted coronavirus last March, she has grappled with a variety of what are considered long-term symptoms of the disease, including intense neuropathy-damage to the brain and spinal cord that often manifests as pain in the hands and feet, concentrated in the clusters of nerves that gather at these farthest reaches of the body. Bristling with nerve endings, they are in constant communication with our brains as they relay information and act on impulses they don’t respond to our consciousness, but rather form it-ten different starting points for our thoughts and feelings. Our fingertips are among the most sensitive parts of our bodies.

No one is talking about this book