-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
A Novel
by Patricia Lockwood
Book Reviewed by:From the Booker Prize finalist and "formidably gifted writer" (The New York Times), a vertiginous novel about a woman's descent into illness and insanity.
Amid a global pandemic, one young woman is trying to keep the pieces together – of her family, stunned by a devastating loss, and of her mind, left mangled and misfiring from a mystifying disease. She's afraid of her own floorboards, and "WHAT IS LOVE? BABY DON'T HURT ME" plays over and over in her ears. She hates her friends, or more accurately, she doesn't know who they are.
Has the illness stolen her old mind and given her a new one? Does it mean she'll get to start over from scratch, a chance afforded to very few people? The very weave of herself seems to have loosened: time and memories pass straight through her body. "I'm sorry not to respond to your email," she writes, "but I live completely in the present
now."
Will There Ever Be Another You is the brain-shredding, phosphorescent story of one woman's dissolution and her attempt to create a new way of thinking, as well as a profound investigation into what keeps us alive in times of unprecedented disorientation and loss, from one of our most original writers.
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. 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." 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...continued
Full Review
(1060 words)
(Reviewed by Lisa Butts).
In one chapter of Patricia Lockwood's Will There Ever Be Another You, the protagonist narrates her experience giving unofficial lessons in literature to her teenage niece, Angel, who has ambitions of becoming a writer one day herself. Lockwood explains, "Mostly this meant we would read a few pages of whatever I was reading and talk about it...Today, insanely, we were doing Walter Benjamin's 'Hashish in Marseilles.'"
Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) was a German Jewish philosopher and critic, and a master of what we think of today as the personal essay. According to a bio by the editorial staff at Harvard University Press, Benjamin, along with his friend Siegfried Kracauer, "virtually invent[ed] popular culture as an object of ...
If you liked Will There Ever Be Another You, try these:
by Miranda July
Published 2025
The New York Times bestselling author returns with an irreverently sexy, tender, hilarious and surprising novel about a woman upending her life
by Gayl Jones
Published 2023
Legendary writer Gayl Jones returns with a stunning new novel about Black American artists in exile.
by Patricia Lockwood
Published 2018
From Patricia Lockwood - a writer acclaimed for her wildly original voice - a vivid, heartbreakingly funny memoir about having a married Catholic priest for a father.
Second hand books are wild books...
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Can you name the title?
Test your book knowledge with our daily trivia challenge!
