In Her New Book, One of Our Funniest Writers Attempts the Impossible

"In the aftermath of her COVID infection, caught in the meshes of a new sort of illness, she found herself unable to locate the right words and striking out dysfunctional paragraphs. "This was her trick, her only trick," "she" thinks in Will There Ever Be Another You. "How was she supposed to do her trick when everything had been put back in the wrong place?""

""She" is another version of the narrator-that is, Lockwood-and the "another you" of the novel's title. "Some mornings she seemed true, and then she was I; some mornings she seemed false, and then she was she." Will There Ever Be Another You does eventually come back to the first-person singular, but before it does, the novel wanders through Lockwood's disorientation in chapters jungly with bewildering language that occasionally open out into exhilarating clearings."

"At times the altered state or altered selfhood she inhabits resembles the thoughts of an addled surrealist: She becomes convinced, for example, that there is a secret number between 2 and 3. Sometimes she seems to be stricken by some rare but recognizable form of mental illness, as when her own wrist appears alien to her, and she sends photos to her friends as "proof." She loses her ability to assess social interactions, confused ab"

After a COVID infection, a narrator experiences severe cognitive disruption characterized by brain fog, inability to retrieve words, and malfunctioning paragraphs. Language loses its reliability and habitual mental strategies fail. The narrator's sense of self fragments and shifts between pronouns, producing alternating identities and altered selfhood. Surreal convictions arise, such as belief in a secret number between two and three, alongside recognizable symptoms like derealization and alienation from body parts. Social perception degrades and interactions become confusing. Moments of bewildering, dense language occasionally clear into lucid, exhilarating passages, suggesting intermittent reclamation of coherence amid prolonged disorientation.

Read at Slate Magazine