"In 2020, Patricia Lockwood lost her mind. Not in the way that everyone lost their minds - all the grocery-sanitizing and sourdough-baking; the insistence that Zoom "raves" were fun and that your friends had always wanted to pick up needlepoint, actually - but in a clinical, nebulous-syndrome-caused-by-the-novel-coronavirus way. Lockwood's vision warped, her identity fractured, her own body grew unfamiliar. Metaphor and reality sat next to each other inside her mind, occasionally trading places."
"In the hallucinatory Will There Ever Be Another You ( out Sept. 23 from Riverhead), Lockwood's second novel after 2021's No One Is Talking About This, she writes her way out of Wonderland. "I've been saying that No One Is Talking About This was written sane, edited crazy, and this book was the inverse of that - written totally crazy and edited sane," the author tells Bustle."
In 2020 Patricia Lockwood experienced a COVID-linked neuropsychiatric condition that warped vision, fractured identity, and produced intense dissociation and bodily unfamiliarity. Those experiences became the basis for the novel Will There Ever Be Another You, which preserves hallucinatory prose and a sense of otherworldly dissociation. The creative process balanced chaotic invention and careful editing to retain strangeness while achieving coherence. The two recent works blur autobiography and memoir boundaries, with a stated preference for generative impulse over strict categorization. The author reflects on whether illness fuels originality and notes everyday choices, like caffeine, affect creative operation.
Read at Bustle
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