Patricia Lockwood rose to prominence through sharp, absurdist social-media posts and began as a poet before expanding into memoir, criticism, and fiction. Her memoir Priestdaddy and novel No One Is Talking About This showcased humor and a distinct voice. After contracting COVID-19 in March 2020, she experienced long COVID symptoms that disrupted her body and cognition, including difficulty forming sentences. She later developed a new novel, Will There Ever Be Another You, centered on chronic sickness and the erosion of mind and art. She lives in Savannah with her husband, Jason Kendall, and three cats.
Back in the good old days of Twitter, the writer Patricia Lockwood helped to make the internet silly and sublime with tweets such as ".@parisreview So is Paris any good or not" and a series of absurdist sexts involving rock slides, dewdrops, and plot holes in the novels of Dan Brown. But she got her literary start offline, as a poet. She went on to prove herself as a memoirist, critic, and novelist, imbuing each genre with her distinctive sense of humor and unreproducible voice.
In the summer of 2020, Lockwood published a piece in the London Review of Books called "Insane After Coronavirus?" She reported that she had caught COVID in March, and gave a characteristically funny but disturbing account of what was starting to be known as "long COVID." The virus had messed with her body and, worse, her mind; she struggled to string sentences together.
Earlier this year, when I learned that Lockwood had written a new novel, "Will There Ever Be Another You," about her experience of chronic sickness, I wanted to talk to her about it, and to understand what had happened to her in the course of the past five years. This spring, for a story that appears in this week's special centenary issue, I went down to Savannah, where Lockwood lives with her husband, Jason Kendall, and their three cats.
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