a b "Billy Bragg Sings Songs Of Protest". Philadelphia Daily News. 1988-05-29 . Retrieved 2013-07-15. I inhaled None of This Is Serious. I've been waiting for a fictional story that reflects the all-consuming influence that the Internet has on my life. None of This Is Serious is that story. A compulsively readable, fresh and painfully accurate description of the way we live now. Don't let the title fool you. It is serious. Seriously good." - Louise Nealon

None of This Is Serious by Catherine Prasifka review — a

Edgy . . . [Prasifka] has a painfully raw and acute gift for catching the way things are"— Sunday Times None of This Is Serious is brilliant – so devastatingly precise about being a young woman living in Ireland and online today, moving deftly between sharp, hilarious observations and heartbreaking, enraging moments’ Isn't it weird to think that everything is so unstable? Like, we all believe in the magic of technology; it feels so permanent but, just like that, it's gone.” This book vows to show the uncertainty and absurdity of being alive today, as well as draw the line between real world and online. In addition, it's about relationships of all kinds, body image, and the inevitable doom that we will soon face. We sit on the love seat in the corner of Grace’s sitting room. It’s cold inside, so I pull the blanket on the armrest over me. Without words, Finn grabs it too and gets under it with me. He pulls my legs over his lap.The debaters Grace knows from college are exchanging proper nouns at a speed that makes me dizzy. Sentences lose their meaning. There’s someone arguing for free speech, and someone else explaining the difference between that and actively platforming someone. I hear the phrase ‘the marketplace of ideas’. One of them tries to engage me in conversation, I think to help bolster his point, but I haven’t been paying attention. In an interesting narrative technique, Prasifka uses speech marks for other characters but Sophie’s dialogue is integrated into the text, such that in her first-person telling we sometimes don’t know if she is speaking or thinking. None of this is Serious is a celebration of just how wonderful the world is but also just how strange modern life can really be. Delving into the amazing truth of having worldwide connection at your fingertips - but the dangers that come with it too. The mental anguish that seeing polished, curated social media feeds can cause and of course how easily the internet can become a rumour mill. Ultimately, this is not negative or positive, it simply is a style of presenting the extremities that exist within ourselves & within the world around us. When we are well-placed we find the world can be a kind place. When we are on the wrong foot, our heels snap & our bones are forever tender to a misstep. With every phrase this story crafts a tale as stark as the ripple in the sky over Ireland. Does anything matter when the world is coming to an end? Can we focus on any one particularly serious matter in hopes that it results in being more than it is? I’m so full of shame I can’t exist inside my body, so I scroll through my phone. Every other part of the world is either already awake, or hasn’t yet gone to sleep, and I’m able to read endless content. Online, you’re never alone.”

This Is Serious - Wikipedia This Is Serious - Wikipedia

Personally, all these stories resonate with me and I really enjoy their niche genre. None of This is Serious is a wonderful addition to the group. Finn pulls at my sleeve and asks if we can go and chat somewhere. I nod mechanically. My mouth is dry, so I stop along the way to refill my wine glass. Balancing visions of the apocalypse with a Gen-Z everywoman’s daily grind, None of This is Serious is an astute portrayal of how the minutiae of our personal lives inevitably loom larger than global issues. Grace says, ‘Yeah, but he messages you all the time, he’s not fair. You actually just can’t trust men.’An extraordinary novel. None of This Is Serious brilliantly explores the impossibility to "come of age" in end times, where screens are so contiguous to experience that no-one is ever truly online or offline. She writes truthfully and with affectless nuance about the labyrinthine workings of friend groups and the defences women scramble for in a world that still hates us’ I refresh the feed every minute and continue to consume, growing fat. I’m like a vampire, leeching off the content of other people’s lives. I flit between social bubbles, each one with a slightly different rhythm. The girls I know from school are the same as always, each personality moving against the others in a well-practised dance. They welcome me into their group, but I have nothing to say to them. Niamh asks me, ‘What are you up to now?’ as though we’ve not spoken in months, and I remember that we haven’t. I wonder at what point I became an outsider and if it’s their fault or mine. They don’t try to convince me to stay when I stand up and mumble an excuse; they are too engrossed in each other’s lives. Catherine Prasifka was born in Dublin in 1996. She studied English Literature at Trinity College Dublin and has an MLitt in Fantasy from the University of Glasgow. She has competed in both the European Debating Championships and the World Championships. She is obsessed with learning about how stories work and has ruined nearly all of her favourite books and movies by overanalyzing them. She works as a creative writing teacher in Dublin. None of This Is Serious is her first novel. We go outside and look up at the sky. Where before there was only light pollution, now there’s a hairline fracture spanning as far as I can see in either direction. It’s lit from within by a violet glow that seeps across the night sky.