""People were writing poems," Patricia Lockwood tells us. Also: "People brought you cabbages." In her hands, events don't unfold in the usual way, with a beginning, middle, and end. Instead, we seem to come upon people and things doing what they always do, their actions and goings on both a matter of course and an incorrigible fact of their existence."
"She arrived on the literary scene, some 15 years or so ago, apparently fully-formed, blurring at the edges slightly and yet for that all the more identifiable as herself. Her poetry, her uncanny ability to post viral tweets-back when that meant something, though no one had any idea what-her immediately recognizable prose style, all that having the feeling not so much of promise but fulfillment, an IOU from the culture to itself, finally being paid."
"Lockwood's facility in pointing out that uncanny sense of things happening both now and always-exploring it, and yet allowing it to remain untouched, unspoiled, unconquered by explanation-has been among her greatest gifts as a writer of the internet and an internet-addled age. It has come to her aid again in Will There Ever Be Another You, her autobiographical novel of long COVID, that curiously social and socialized malady, the persistence of which is matched only by the doubt that it even exists."
Patricia Lockwood arrived on the literary scene fully formed, her poetry and viral tweets establishing a highly recognizable prose style. Her prose conjures events as ongoing, cyclical facts of existence, creating a sensation that moments have been happening forever. The novel Will There Ever Be Another You follows a fictionalized Lockwood through life as an in-demand writer coping with long COVID alongside deaths, near-deaths, reading tours, and meetings with the pope. The narrative sits in a borderland between ordinary and fantastical, using repetition and duration to make persistent illness feel social and both undeniably present and doubted. The book balances uncanny observation with emotional candor.
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