What readers think of Will There Ever Be Another You, plus links to write your own review.

I listened to this book read by the author. I think this may be my first foray into autofiction. Lockwood has crafted a novel around her contracting COVID in March 2020 and the devastating effects of it on her life and recovery. Lockwood was among the first writers "to shape the cognitive estrangement of the virus, its febrile illogic." In July 2020 she wrote of losing memory like "great chunks of plaster" falling all around her. With this in mind, the story follows the fictional Patricia as she arrives in Scotland with her husband and family where the nightmare begins. Patricia is besieged by hallucinations, aphasia, migraines, amnesia, paranoia and constant wondering if she's alive. It's quite exhausting in this short book to listen to all that!

There are some funny moments especially the one about the references to Dolly the clone. The Google link for the publisher, Penguin Random House, says "A vertiginous love that word novel of a woman's descent into illness and insanity." Indeed the book seems to spiral and swirl as Patricia's mind wonders and as she keeps asking herself what's real. At one point Patricia is dealing with her husband's illness which results I believe into a botched surgery (as I listened to this I kept wondering what my nurse practitioner daughter would be thinking reading this - it seemed to me to be a wonder the guy survived - but then l'd ask is this Patricia sane? So you have to consider the narrator reliability. As Lockwood told an interviewer, "I wrote it insane, and edited it sane."

Because listened to this novel and it is told in diary entries and story line, I did wonder if this might be better to read. But overall the writing - and Lockwood is a great narrator reliability- is lovely and the story about recovering from long COVID is worthy of a read. I feel fortunate that I didn’t get this.