The cult author’s autofictional follow-up to No One Is Talking About This is the story of a breakdown
I
t sounds like the setup to a joke: a viral author and a global virus walk into a novel. The punchline is long Covid, an illness that defies narrative – dissolves it. Patricia Lockwood’s new autofiction, Will There Ever Be Another You, is the product of that cruel dissolution. “I wrote it insane, and edited it sane,” she explained in a recent interview. The madness is the method. But must you know the mind before you can know the madness?
Lockwood is the literary Frankenchild of Dorothy Parker and Flannery O’Connor: a heretical wit fused with gothic strangeness, vintage quippery rewired for the digital age. She’s the kind of writer who inspires parasocial devotion and copycat haircuts. Even her cats are internet-famous. The sacred text of Lockwood lore is Priestdaddy, her glorious 2017 memoir, which introduced readers to the American author’s trouser-resistant father, an ordained Catholic priest who blew his daughter’s college fund on a vintage guitar.
The pandemic handed Lockwood a new absurdity. She contracted Covid early, in March of 2020, when transmission was blamed on grotty fingers and every doorknob was suspect – the era of fruit bleaching and handwashing jingles. She was among the first writers to give shape to the cognitive estrangement of the virus, its febrile illogic. “Hours, days of my memory had fallen out of my mind like chunks of plaster,” she wrote that July, as if the worst was behind her.
