BookBrowse Reviews Will There Ever Be Another You by Patricia Lockwood

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A writer experiences neurological issues after contracting a virus in this clever work of autofiction exploring the creative process.

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Divided into three parts, Patricia Lockwood's second novel centers primarily around a writer who is experiencing neurological changes as a result of illness contracted during a global pandemic. Like her first novel, it is a work of autofiction. But unlike No One Is Talking About This, which focused on the death of Lockwood's niece, Will There Ever Be Another You is only loosely committed to its central narrative. Like its protagonist, the book is scattered, distracted, and telegraphing brilliance in every direction where it sets its sights (or as the narrator has come to think of her synesthesia-tinged symptoms, "sighghts").

The illness narrative begins in earnest with a chapter titled "The Changeling," a reference to the protagonist's split from herself; unlike the rest of the book, it is narrated in third person, further demonstrating this existential flux. In addition to the unusual physical symptoms ("Before she learned of the existence of 'alien hand syndrome,' she had tentatively diagnosed herself with a new illness called Who Foot Is That"), her speech is affected, and her ability to read and understand language. In recounting these details, Lockwood is at her very best—penetrating, distressing, and funny in a way that makes you wonder if you should really be laughing, as in the scene at a doctor's office where she feels incapable of explaining her amorphous maladies:

"How to tell him I cannot do my work​? He would look at her—in her Looney Tunes shirt, and her cutoffs that she wore because one day she had tried a sort of wrap dress and then looked down at the crosswalk and hee vaguna was out (that's how she found it written down later, hee vaguna)—and say, Exactly what is your work?"

Lockwood is one of the funniest writers of our time, and this book is, perversely, her funniest work to date. But her depiction of the neurological effects of her illness is terrifying—she doesn't feel attached to her own name anymore, body parts seem to drift away, her mind alternately races and becomes obstinately stuck:

"A year later, she would find herself obsessively revising 150 words she had written about this experience...but she could not make it mean anything, and she did not know why...Some mornings she seemed true, and then she was I; some mornings she seemed false, and then she was she. And long after that, she could not even read the 150 words—it was like walking a path into a dark wood—or the feeling of madness would begin again: Who am I, what do I do?"

Lockwood also addresses, and with the success of the novel as a whole effectively disputes, the commonly accepted notion that the great events of our time (i.e., 9/11, or in this case, the beginning of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic) should not appear in the contemporary literature, "because almost as soon as they happened they were transformed into propaganda." I think another reason is that placing these events into a contemporary book makes it seem dated almost at once. And this is an issue Will There Ever Be Another You will really have to contend with because people were ready to forget the pandemic as soon as there was a vaccine and an end to government-ordered mandates around masking and other protections. On the one hand, the book is marketed as fiction and the word "Covid" rarely appears in it, potentially to safeguard against this issue. On the other, it is so viscerally of its time (and, one imagines, of the author's experience of it) that it reads more like memoir.

This is why Will There Ever Be Another You is a profoundly important book. Lockwood wrestles meaningfully with the experience of Long Covid on the page, in a way that will be especially impactful for those who have contracted the disease and come out changed—and this is a lot of people. While the numbers are no longer being as carefully tracked, in 2025 the CDC estimates that up to 18 million Americans (one million of which are children) are dealing with Long Covid symptoms. This is almost 7% of the population. And yet, in addition to not writing about it, it seems like we are not supposed to talk about it, think about it, or advocate for those disabled by it (including ourselves).

Like No One Is Talking About This, Will There Ever Be Another You is about grief. But this novel is not about any one person's death, or even the 7 to 21 million people worldwide who have died from Covid-19 so far (estimates vary widely). Instead, it grieves the death of the world as we knew it before the pandemic.

"'I can't believe this happened to us. To the world,' they would sometimes say quietly in bed at night."

For many, especially those who have been disabled by this virus, or have lost a loved one to it, watching the world move on has been an exercise in never-ending grief.

The third part of the book reads more like an essay collection than a novel; while the characters are the same and there are thematic constants (above all, medical crisis), the chapters begin to feel less like a linear narrative or cohesive whole. This section is no less meaningful, and in fact this is where Lockwood does some of her best meditating on the creative process. ("The best version was when you were in it and all the components were in hurricane. No one could ever read that but you and the people who inherited your papers, but it was the real thing, in its way.")

While ruthless capitalism's need for bodies at work and the Protestant desire to repress trauma in favor of stoic placidity have combined to push the pandemic out of the American sight and mind, infection, illness, death, and disability continue. In particular, the disabled and those suffering from chronic conditions, like Long Covid, have been pushed out of public life because wearing a mask, still the most effective means of preventing transmission, evokes unpleasant memories. While in some ways Lockwood too cannot resist the call of neat and tidy narratives in the end, she captures with perfect pitch the anxiety, the agony, the desperation of the historical moment, which for many of us carries on into the present day, and the future.

This review first ran in the September 24, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.