Whether or not you think that’s an exaggeration, it’s true that he was a very big deal between 20 that he’s already less of a big deal in 2021 and that by 2030 we’ll have a whole lot of other things to worry about. Irritatingly, Trump is never mentioned by name he is just ‘the dictator’. It was about texting….’ If you don’t instantly know that this is Kristen Roupenian’s ‘Cat Person’, then you are not ‘everyone’ and this book is not for you. Entry level test: what is the narrator referring to here? ‘Everyone was reading the same short story. If you’re not au fait with Twitter - more specifically, if you haven’t been keeping up with recent online trends - you will struggle to understand the first half. One obvious issue is the sheer friability of the material. Lockwood’s energetic prose zips from killer simile to daft gag to wise epigram. They know they don’t have long with her - just six months, it turns out - but they nurture her and love her with intense, unflagging focus. To everyone’s surprise, she lives, despite a rare genetic condition that makes her head grow abnormally fast. The family find themselves up against an arcane, inhumane US law relating to when babies can be delivered. A real-life event has overtaken the narrator: her sister’s pregnancy is complicated. Then, Part Two begins and we’re jolted out of the portal. Soon you’re wondering how long she can keep it up.

She looks at the portal and takes the occasional shower. The strenuously entertaining narrator doesn’t do much. ‘I was just remembering how we used to complain about noisy people in crowded cinemas.’ It can make for an arresting rhythm, full of pregnant pauses and comic juxtapositions. These tweet-style utterances are separated by asterisks. Inside, it was tropical and snowing, and the first flake of the blizzard of everything landed on her tongue and melted.’ Lockwood employs a format popularised by Maggie Nelson and Jenny Offill: each discrete section of prose is on average eight lines long, occasionally longer, often shorter. ‘She opened the portal, and the mind met her more than halfway. ‘This’ refers to ‘the portal’, the book’s word for the internet. No One is Talking About This is her first novel. (2017) featured a hilarious, tender portrait of her guitar-shredding, gun-loving Catholic priest father. You put your whole head through me.’ In 2013 she went viral with her prose-poem ‘Rape Joke’, which was deliberately, powerfully not funny, yet still let in some killer laughs. On Twitter she is known for her zany ‘sexts’: ‘I am a living male turtleneck.

There are punchlines, there are callbacks. She is straightforwardly hit-the-rubber-nail-on-the-head funny. The American poet and essayist Patricia Lockwood isn’t one of them. Some writers - Jane Austen, for example - get to funny sideways, using irony and understatement.

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