36 pages • 1-hour read
No One is Talking About This
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Part 1, Chapters 6-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary
The protagonist relates her childhood fear of having hiccups after reading about a man who suffered from hiccups for 55 years. She worries that in the portal “everything tangled in the stream of everything else” (84) with no distinction between what is popular and what is important.
She believes men of her father’s socioeconomic upbringing to have been “infected” with conservative and misogynistic beliefs. When speaking with her mother, the protagonist learns that someone she attended high school with has lately “escaped, who was nowhere to be found in any of the places where you typed in names” (85).
The protagonist considers how feminism is currently obsessed with beauty trends, when before it was bound feet, poisonous teeth whitening, and other harmful habits undertaken in the name of beauty. The protagonist believes that her current choice of beauty trends is not a choice she made freely, nor were the choices of past women made freely. Rather, they are culturally determined. One of her admirers on the portal pays her $300 for a pair of used sneakers. In a text exchange with her brother, the protagonist cries, “Why are we talking like this?!” (87) in response to his use of slang. The protagonist doesn’t know how to explain the habits the portal has made its users adopt or how to explain its use of language.
The protagonist and her husband have their biggest fight over the Milgram experiment, which studied obedience to authority figures. The protagonist is upset because her husband doesn’t believe that humans, on average, would harm one another to appease an authority figure. She believes that the portal has manipulated her into her opinions and morality, and “she could even feel exhilarated to think she had been manipulated this way” (93). By being manipulated, the protagonist can experience global culture without having to physically move. She wonders, however, what the manipulation has been used for and briefly considers that the portal has been used to make Americans weak and susceptible.
The protagonist becomes increasingly dissociated from reality and feels she needs a break from the portal. She asks her husband for a safe for her birthday to lock her phone in while he is at work. The safe is inscribed with “New English” on the side. The protagonist only lasts two days with her phone locked away before going to her husband’s office in the middle of the day and making a scene until he unlocks the safe and returns her phone to her.
Part 1, Chapter 7 Summary
The protagonist tries self-care techniques currently popular on the portal, such as a Yoni egg and bath salts but questions what she terms her “susceptibility” to following trends. Whenever she attempts to take time away from the portal, “the Thread tugged her back toward it. She could not help following it” (99). To explain her susceptibility, she relates a traumatic incident from her childhood when she abandoned her two younger siblings to escape a swarm of bees. Once she retrieved her mother, they found her two siblings nearly stung to death.
After failing to connect with the protagonist while she is engaged in the portal, her husband describes her facial expression as that of a ventriloquist’s dummy. The protagonist is immediately resentful of this statement: “He was always saying things like this just when she was at her most alive” (102). The protagonist describes her cousin born with autism. She believes that he is more attuned to real life than she is as she is consumed with the false reality of the portal.
The protagonist considers that her father might not be entirely at fault for his political and social opinions and has her mother search his medicine cabinet for possible toxins she read about on the portal. Her husband is convinced that the protagonist’s father is brainwashed, but the protagonist points out that her husband is part of a secretive, cultish exercise group and is not so different from her father.
As her sister’s due date approaches, the protagonist cannot help wondering if she would like to be a mother. When she encounters a young girl on a plane during her travels, the protagonist experiences a moment of insight as “a bloom suddenly all over her skin: maybe she was up to it, after all” (109). Then the protagonist’s grandmother dies. In attending the funeral, the protagonist continues to think about what she would tell her grandchildren (if she were to have any) about her culture.
Nothing in the portal can be owned by a single person. The protagonist does not consider the post that began her rise to fame (“Can a dog be twins?”) as hers but watches it disseminate among other users to such an extent that nothing about it feels like hers anymore. “No one and everyone” owns the portal (113).
Part 1, Chapters 6-7 Analysis
As the protagonist continues to notice disappearances from the portal and real life, she is startled by her mother’s use of the word “escape” in describing a friend that the protagonist originally described as “disappeared.” This word change suggests the protagonist’s latent desire to “escape” in the same way as this childhood friend, who is somehow able to keep a distance from the portal’s influence. These chapters show the protagonist struggling with the idea of “escape” and whether she can orchestrate her escape from the portal by having her husband lock up her phone while he is at work.
Beyond this issue of escape is the protagonist’s desire to use English properly and without the influence of the portal. She shows severe anxiety about the trajectory of the English language, frequently questioning the ways in which people speak to each other through the portal. This anxiety is addressed when the safe her husband presents her with has the term “New English” engraved on the side. Not only is she locking her phone away to discover a “new” English for herself, but she is attempting to escape from the influence of the English of the portal. Her attempt at escape fails and she returns wholeheartedly to life in the portal.
The question of choice, whether she is using the portal of her own volition, worries the protagonist. Her behavior is that of an addict in that she tries to escape the portal in the same moments that she is deeply invested in it. The portal maintains absolute authority over the protagonist’s life, but she does not completely trust this authority, as demonstrated in the fight with her husband over the Milgram experiment. The protagonist is certain that people will harm one another to appease an authority figure; she does not see how the portal is any different from the experiment’s researchers. She feels trapped in a role imposed upon her by the portal’s collective mind: “It was so easy to believe that you freely chose the paints, polishes, and waist-trainers of your own time” (86). She is the ventriloquist dummy as described by her husband, acting according to what the portal expects of her. Like an addict, the protagonist will try most anything—self-care baths and Yoni eggs—that are currently popular on the portal and depends upon its approval of her posts, speeches, and presentations for her self-confidence.
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