Editorial Content for Will There Ever Be Another You

With a memoir (PRIESTDADDY) and a novel (NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT THIS), in her relatively brief career as a prose writer, Patricia Lockwood has garnered considerable critical acclaim and a large body of admiring readers. Her new book, WILL THERE EVER BE ANOTHER YOU, may be a test of the durability of that admiration. It’s an edgy, enigmatic concoction that relies heavily on elements of her own life, blurring the line between fact and fiction to create a hybrid that seems to represent her attempt to stretch the boundaries of the form.

In a recent New Yorker profile, Lockwood reveals that, instead of calling WILL THERE EVER BE ANOTHER YOU a novel, she prefers to think of it as a “pineapple, or a chandelier” --- items that for her represent “a revolving object that you’re seeing all sides of at once.” As she told her interviewer, “I was just going to put you inside the cyclone.” It’s an apt description of a work that’s likely to induce in at least some readers a serious sense of disorientation.

The two axes on which the story pivots are rooted in the physical challenges that Lockwood or her fictional counterpart faced after contracting COVID-19 in March 2020 and her husband’s near-death experience following initial surgery for a sudden intestinal condition, the frightening aftermath of which she recounts in the chapter “The Wound.” The inception of that ordeal is described in detail and much more conventionally in a February 2023 article in the London Review of Books, where she serves as a contributing editor.

"...an edgy, enigmatic concoction that relies heavily on elements of [Lockwood's] own life, blurring the line between fact and fiction to create a hybrid that seems to represent her attempt to stretch the boundaries of the form."

In Lockwood’s own case, as she relates in a chapter entitled “The Changeling,” the female protagonist’s medical journey begins with “feeling that she was not quite herself,” followed by a cornucopia of symptoms that include everything from a fever that lasted 48 days, to something called “alien hand syndrome,” and a trip to the ER when she couldn’t feel herself going to the bathroom. “She felt she was trying to sing one of the Emily Dickinson poems that couldn’t be sung to the theme song of ‘Gilligan’s Island’ to the theme song of ‘Gilligan’s Island,’” Lockwood writes. Even as her sister had been working on a vaccine, going so far as to administer two doses to herself while pregnant to prove its safety, her father --- a most unconventional Catholic priest --- “would refuse to take it, of course, believing it put barcodes in people.”

But both characters’ medical crises are narrated in such an offhanded fashion that they largely fail to engage our sympathies for either victim. Melodrama and self-pity aren’t essential elements of an illness story, but this one seems to fall at the opposite extreme.

Along the way, Lockwood alludes to the effort she embarked on with her friend, Heidi, to develop PRIESTDADDY as a television series, shares random pieces of her personal and family history, and offers bits of literary and cultural criticism that touch on William Carlos Williams, Vincent Van Gogh, Stephen Sondheim, Lydia Davis and others.

Lockwood devotes a chapter to what she calls a “mushroom diary” --- an analysis of ANNA KARENINA while she was in the midst of a 48-hour “hallucinogenic program to heal my mind.” In another section, she writes of discussing Walter Benjamin’s essay, “Hashish in Marseilles” (while admitting that she “never handled drugs well”), with her teenage homeschooled niece. The absence of context for these intermittent diversions prevents them from achieving much emotional resonance.

WILL THERE EVER BE ANOTHER YOU does have its appealing moments. Lockwood delivers some quirky humor of the sort that brought her to prominence in the early days of Twitter (or “the portal,” as she called it in NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT THIS), as when she describes the sweater worn for a photo shoot that “made her look exactly like Cookie Monster.” One also can choose simply to surrender to the syncopated rhythms of her writing without endeavoring to fit any given scene or chapter into a larger whole.

Scenes like this one in the book’s opening section --- recalling a trip Lockwood took to the Isle of Skye’s Fairy Pools with her husband, mother and sister after the death of her niece from the congenital disorder that’s described in the moving second half of NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT THIS --- are especially striking:

“There were natural bridges, caves heaped with uniform gray treasure, keyholes of bloodstone-colored water, raindrops on the lens, trees clinging to cliffs, the falls too fast for cameras, like fairies, and the long natural stairs that her sister climbed…. You could pose with a Red Bull next to the tallest waterfall and make it seem like you were peeing. A perfect place.”

Without doubt, WILL THERE EVER BE ANOTHER YOU may engender more enthusiasm for Lockwood among her most devoted readers. Others who have been impressed with her previous books may find in it occasion to abandon the roller coaster ride that seems inherent in her writing. Anyone who wants to engage with her for the first time would be better advised to begin with one of her earlier works.