36 pages • 1-hour read
No One is Talking About This
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Part 2, Chapters 8-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2, Chapter 8 Summary
While waiting for a flight at an airport, the protagonist notices the way the sun lights up a couple with identical mullets. “She sat in the gold that made them the same and felt a little less like dying” (117). When she later talks with another influencer about their lives lived in the portal, the protagonist is elated to find someone who is as dependent on the portal as she is. She attempts to present her theory on modern womanhood during a speech but cuts herself short after she hears a groan from the crowd.
The protagonist receives a text from her mother asking how soon the protagonist can fly home as something is wrong with her sister’s unborn child. The shock of the text makes the protagonist realize how absorbed in the portal she has been: “She fell heavily out of the broad warm of us, out of the story that has seemed, up till the very last minute, to require her perpetual co-writing” (120).
The protagonist flies to meet her family, moves in with them, and accompanies her sister to an ultrasound. The technician shows them the asymmetrical development of the baby’s body. Abortion is not an option for the sister, who is beyond the legally permissible time in her state of Ohio. The protagonist offers to drive her sister to another state and obtain a legal abortion, but both know that they would be disowned by their parents if they did so. They consult a social worker whose only suggestion is for the sister to go out running and accidentally induce a miscarriage. To further complicate the matter, the sister’s hospital is a Catholic institution. The protagonist briefly stops interacting in the portal.
A neurologist and team of doctors inform the sister that her child is the first in-utero fetus to be diagnosed with Proteus syndrome, characterized by an asymmetrical and uncontrolled rapid growth of tissue. Only the neurologist predicts that the baby will be alive at birth.
A new law is passed in Ohio that prohibits inducing a woman before 37 weeks under any circumstance. The protagonist sees the “naked fear on the doctor’s faces” (132) and is infuriated with her father favoring his conservative politics over the pain her sister is in. They petition an ethics board and are granted permission for a 35-week delivery. When the sister is induced, the baby is born alive.
Part 2, Chapter 9 Summary
The birth of the baby put the portal into perspective for the protagonist. She no longer feels as if her thoughts are echoes of other people in the portal. She is named godmother to the baby, and the family has the baby baptized soon after her birth. The protagonist is excited by the baby’s presence and resilience, despite the doctors fearing she will not live long. It is inconceivable to her that the miracle of the baby’s birth is completely unknown on the portal, but at the same time, she has no desire to post about the baby. Despite her enthusiasm, fear for the baby’s potentially short life overwhelms and depresses her. The family watches a monitor feed of the baby in the hospital’s nursery at night and can signal a nurse if anything seems to be wrong.
The protagonist goes to the hospital immediately after waking up each morning. She begins reading aloud to the baby, noticing that the baby responds to her voice. Her obsession with the portal and traveling for work become a distant memory: “She could barely recall her previous life” (151) and has no desire to share the baby’s life or story with the portal. Her husband comes to visit. The more time she spends with the baby, the protagonist has dreams of becoming a mother and is encouraged in these thoughts by her father.
The family considers that the baby only knows what it is like to be herself and is therefore unharmed by her difference from babies born without Proteus syndrome; this is a relief and inspiration to the protagonist. She begins to reconnect with her father over their love for the baby. The sister and her husband paint their home nursery pink and decorate it with swans in preparation for the baby’s release from the NICU.
Part 2, Chapters 8-9 Analysis
At the beginning of Chapter 8, the protagonist is addicted to the portal and the sense of connection it gives her. Her dependency on the portal has fully shifted into an addictive need that she must fill. However, the portal never fully alleviates her loneliness. At the airport watching the couple with matching mullets, the protagonist suffers from extreme disconnection and loneliness, which only abate when she puts herself physically close to them.
This desire for greater intimacy with others in real life coincides with the baby’s birth. The protagonist briefly disappears from the portal to devote her attention to her family and the baby. Her weak connections made through the portal are replaced by the strong connection she has with her family as she immerses herself in her sister’s struggle. The baby’s birth quickly overshadows the portal for the protagonist, and she experiences relief at having her thoughts to herself once again: “But for now, the previous unshakable conviction that someone else was writing the inside of her head was gone” (143).
As her mind becomes more her own again, the protagonist actively keeps the baby’s presence out of the portal by not posting about her. She maintains a separation between the unreality of the portal and its collective mind and the birth of her niece. The baby’s birth is such a monumental and life-changing event for her family that it is a shock that the portal is not talking about it even without her input. At the same time, the protagonist is excited that nobody on the portal is talking about her niece. When she envisions expressing her excitement for the baby by running down the street and crying out her surprise that no one is talking about the baby, her enthusiasm is directed toward sharing the baby’s life with real people even if they are strangers on the street.
Though the baby survives, the struggle her sister experienced with healthcare and conservative politics during her pregnancy intensifies the protagonist’s criticism of the American sociopolitical climate. The sisters question whether they have been transported back in time to a less feminist era when a social worker’s only suggestion is to go for a run and “accidentally” induce a miscarriage. Bureaucracy and newly implemented laws that govern the agency of a pregnant woman’s body directly relate to the conservative politics that the sisters’ father believes in. Though he can see the danger to his daughter, the father remains against aborting the baby mid-pregnancy. The sister’s legal and political struggle during her pregnancy exemplifies the pervasiveness of conservative politics and cultural ideology that rule over the protagonist’s parents and childhood home.
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