When Illness Makes You Into a New Person

"One hundred years ago, Virginia Woolf wondered why, "considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings," it had not "taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature." In the century since, Woolf's provocation has been met many times over-in works as varied as Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals, and John Green's YA best seller The Fault in Our Stars."

"Woolf wrote in 'On Being Ill' that 'it is to the poets that we turn' when 'illness makes us disinclined for the long campaigns that prose exacts.' But she also acknowledged that 'some prose writers are to be read as poets.' Let me make the case for reading Patricia Lockwood's new novel, Will There Ever Be Another You, which explores the effects of long COVID on a writer, in precisely this way."

Illness continuously produces profound spiritual and experiential change yet often remains peripheral among literature’s central themes. A contemporary narrative follows a writer who contracts coronavirus early in the pandemic and endures lingering symptoms for four years, shifting between first- and third-person viewpoints. Poetic phrasing and internet-inflected language combine to make ordinary life feel alien and, at times, unexpectedly interesting. Prior acclaim for a study of online culture parallels the narrator’s identity and situates the sickness within broader cultural contexts. Formal play and careful diction capture uncertainty, long-term cognitive effects, and the complex interiority of chronic illness.

Read at The Atlantic