Now Lockwood has put that strength into her first novel, No One is Talking About This, which leaves no doubt that she still takes her literary vocation seriously.

It's another attention-grabbing mind-blower which toggles between irony and sincerity, sweetness and blight.

Her unnamed narrator is a social media star who achieved prominence when her post, "Can a dog be twins?" went viral.

Even as Lockwood's narrator acknowledges the difficulty of writing about what she calls "the portal" — especially without "a strong whiff of old white individuals being weird about the blues" — she attempts just that in the first half of this novel.

It's another attention-grabbing mind-blower which toggles between irony and sincerity, sweetness and blight.

The novel shifts into another realm after the narrator receives a text from her mother about dire problems with her younger sister's pregnancy.

In response to this wakeup call, Lockwood's narrator becomes "a citizen of necessity." She moves into the world of NICUs, a place where urgency is real, and wonders, "Why had she entered the portal in the first place.

Lockwood acknowledges that her novel is based on her niece's heartbreaking case — the first person ever to be diagnosed in utero with Proteus Syndrome, a one-in-a-billion disorder whose most famous sufferer was the Elephant Man

"What did we have the right to expect from this life?" her narrator asks