“‘Please don’t write about it,’ people were already begging each other”; “Don’t write about it, people warned each other”; “No one wants to read about any of this,” Patricia Lockwood writes, “and so she kept it hidden.”
“It” is the pandemic, and Lockwood does write about it: about Covid-19, about Lockwood’s own illness with it. Anecdotally, I have also heard that agents, editors, and audiences are uninterested in revisiting the pandemic, as if “it” were all better left behind, forgotten, repressed. “It” encompasses not only the immediate experience of physical illness but also the intellectual and emotional and, dare I say, ontological unmooring of a long illness, not to mention the total unhinging of a world forced to face its vulnerability.
Lockwood pours all this into her latest novel, Will There Ever Be Another You, which is a gleaner’s novel, made up of written and rewritten diary entries, notes-to-self, half-assed essay attempts (nonderogatory — sometimes you can only put half your back into it), and full-assed revelations. The book commits “a cardinal sin,” in Lockwood’s words: “You could not become interested in the illness. You could not lavish on it the love and solicitation you had previously lavished on the self, even though it was the thing that the self had been replaced by.”
Illness can be terribly interesting, especially the first flush of it, before it becomes repetitive and mundane. But that doesn’t mean other people want to hear about it. Lockwood’s narrator doesn’t want to talk about what she’s working on “because if to write about being ill was self-indulgent, what followed was that the most self-indulgent thing of all was to be ill.”
Will There Ever Be Another You has elements of being a sequel to Lockwood’s first novel, No One Is Talking About This; call it No One Wants to Read About This or Look Who’s Not Talking About This Too. Her first novel was about the internet, about Twitter, about consciousness, but also, as I’ve argued in this magazine, about disability: that of her niece, who was born with Proteus syndrome and died as a baby. Will There Ever Be Another You fulfills the promise of having a body: Sooner or later, everyone experiences illness and impairment. Once again, I am grateful that someone is saying so, so beautifully, and with such humor.
In the new book, Lockwood draws out her experience of Long Covid and dashes off dispatches from her husband Jason’s emergency bowel surgery. Perhaps just as painful to the narrator are the ways Lockwood’s autofictionalized parents remain unchanged. Her father denies the reality of the pandemic and becomes further entrenched in his unique variety of conservatism, while her mother at turns empathizes with and betrays her daughter’s emotional reality. In one scene, she shares her daughter’s imaginative capability, looks up at a portentous sky and agrees with a word: “the clouds.” It becomes an inside joke between them, but then her mother laughs at her when she makes “the mistake of uttering this password in front of other people.”
I imagine many readers will find this novel challenging, not merely formally but because it asks us to confront our own hastily repressed memories of disorientation. Audiences seem to appreciate disability narratives when the disability is overcome, or if it contributes to some extraordinary powers, or if the person with disability achieves something despite it. For some, it might be less fun to watch someone muddle through the daily negotiations of impairment, but as someone who has done it myself, I find it inspiring. For this is the last difficult memory of the pandemic the novel bids us remember and relive “before it was possible to not believe in it at all”: that our steady sense of reality could be undone beyond belief.
Illness is so other, so uncanny, such a departure from what life is supposed to be like that you have to try to put into words what it is like. Try to remember the worst pain you’ve had and describe it. Was it like a knife in the belly? An ice pick to the eye? Or could you only point to the pain scale, the dreaded 10, the unhappiest emoji? Lockwood’s novel, it seems to me, could have been written from the vantage point of the Emily Dickinson poem that begins, “Pain has an element of blank; / it cannot recollect / when it began, or if there were / A day when it was not. // It has no future but itself.” At one point, a nurse asks the narrator about her symptoms, and she wants to reply:
I feel that I am being pulled out of the world by the hair — this isn’t the Best American Essays, bitch! “Do you mean that you are dizzy?” the nurse tried to clarify. “Yes,” she said after an obedient moment. “Maybe I mean that I am dizzy.” But she meant that she was being pulled out of the world by the hair.
What it is like is what it is, actually, when the etiology escapes you. The novel makes space for all the vicissitudes of sickness, the strange perceptions, the not-selving. The narrator’s lyrical and neurological Long Covid symptoms include an inability to feel herself go to the bathroom; the light hurting; name estrangement (should she be called Dennis?); alien hand syndrome, aka “Who Foot Is That”; and so on. My editor asked me to be more specific about the narrator’s illness, yet I do not think it would be more specific to say “aphasia,” or “nerve damage,” or “fatigue.” To describe the experience of being ill, we rely on poetic figuration, on similes that help us compare the strange world to the known one. When Jason falls ill, “she heard herself explaining to his body, don’t you know that you’re a metaphor?” But the illness itself, the material facts of disability, the physicality of his wound—the wound, they call it—are not metaphors. No figuration required: The wound is real.
Perhaps this is why the narrator says writing poems was “not possible, not possible, not possible, not possible.” Poetry, of all the written arts, remains most firmly in the figurative. “It’s not possible” is also what the doctors say when her husband is in pain after surgery, right before he nearly bleeds out twice and needs surgery again. This is a common experience of sickness: being told that what you are feeling is not possible because the physician cannot locate the cause of the pain.
The flip side of sickness is that the body can, under the right circumstances, with the right care, heal. Jason’s conclusion: “What I think now is that humans are amazing.” What a miracle it is to go through an excruciating emergency, to be ripped open twice, and to conclude that humans are amazing. It becomes one of those phrases Lockwood repeats because its truth is so dazzling — it is one of the book’s many benedictions. But such a revelation requires an opening.
At first, Lockwood approaches Covid warily, keeping six feet away from it, as it were. In one scene, she sits in a park, typing on her laptop, and then sees a couple she knows from around approaching, maskless: “Get back please, I had it!” I was relieved to see this in writing, such an intense recoil before other humans. This, I think, is what we don’t want to remember: the fear and anxiety induced by someone approaching, someone who maybe had IT, or maybe you have IT and don’t know it and don’t want to give IT to them. And if you have IT, well, then, you are left watching everyone else be Normal while you are confused and insane, to borrow from the title of Lockwood’s iconic diary essay in the London Review of Books: “Insane after coronavirus?”
If you have IT, well, then, you are left watching everyone else be Normal while you are confused and insane.
Lockwood does not gloss over the other wounds of the pandemic, the losses beyond the loss of life. Her father led illegal masses during lockdown, refused the vaccine because it “put barcodes in people”; his rightward turn moved him, like so many other dads, from eccentric to dangerous. I was moved to read the line: “I hated him, of course.” This is a stunning admission about a man whose quirked-up Catholicism, conservatism, and “loose, lazy pile of carnality” was rendered semi-heroic in her memoir Priestdaddy. But Lockwood has changed, unlike her father, unlike so many dads and moms who merely reacted. In a middle chapter, “Schutzenfest,” the family goes to an indoor/outdoor Cincinnati German Catholic festival. She describes the people willing to go inside, barefaced, and sing as “the people who did not believe in death.” Her father is one of them, but he promptly runs to his car when it starts to drizzle. Is he afraid of lightning, the narrator’s sister asks their mother, who replies, “OH YEAH,” in her “OH YEAH voice.” He says he’s seen people electrocuted on the golf course, but her mother says, “He’s remembering Caddyshack.” Lockwood is angriest in this chapter, which is one of the novel’s most accessible; that is, it is relatively coherent in time and place with a story that moves along. Perhaps that’s another reason the novel is so formally scattered — it’s easier to displace anger within humor.
A text from her brother, PJ, pre-vaccine: “Last three boomer-as-fuck posts that my buddy’s uncle posted before dying lol.” The first is an underwater Christ statue captioned “You will get miracle in next 1 hour”; the next says, “Before you cancel Thanksgiving and Christmas with your loved ones, remember that this may be the last holiday you have. We are not guaranteed a single minute on this earth. Stop living in fear and embrace life to its fullest!” And then another Christ. And then he died of Covid. Am I amused that this man died? Is PJ? The narrator? No, likely not, and surely not. This is not included as a liberal-gotcha hypocrisy thing. It has more to do with the idea that embracing life to its fullest might, in fact, include fear and a host of other nasty feelings. How can a life be full without letting in even a little bit of fear that you could lose someone you love?
Ask anyone extremely online what the most fun day on Twitter (RIP) was, and they’ll answer: “The day he got it,” which, as we all know, was the day Trump tested positive for Covid. It’s easy for someone who does not believe they’ll ever die to strip away Medicaid. And I understand that there’s some kind of evangelical thing where it’s good if a lot of people die because then Christ will come back quicker, so living eschatologically is reasonable. But I wonder how different people really are from one another, regardless of their religion or beliefs — that some people really just don’t want to think about IT, death, irrevocable loss, EVER. What is offensive about the people who act like there is nothing to fear, “the people who did not believe in death,” is that it’s also a refusal that there is something to lose, that life is, in fact, incredibly precious. Another tragic lesson of the pandemic: Some people do not care that humans are amazing.
Will There Ever Be Another You is also about literature, how we read and remember and integrate what we read into our lives. Long Covid keeps Lockwood’s narrator from doing her work; that is, reading and writing — poetry, novels, essays for the London Review of Books. Her ability to associate has been scrambled. Lockwood’s diaries and literary criticism are gorgeous. She sprawls all the treasures of a text out on the table and examines them one by one. But sickness crawls across the work, leaves a mucusy trail. I suspect some would-be essays appear in the middle section of the novel, particularly the chapter “Mr. Tolstoy, You’re Driving Me Mad,” a riff on writing a Beatles song that becomes a chapter in the life of a woman “reading Anna Karenina so hard [she] almost died” while microdosing mushrooms.
Lockwood’s essays are meditative and abound with good faith, which I weigh against this aside: “They were always weighing writers to see whether they were good. Not good at writing.”
Sickness crawls across the work, leaves a mucusy trail.
She quotes an article written by an “eighty-five-year-old woman” who worries, about Lockwood’s stand-in, “I do not know if she is interested in ethics.” The actual line from the (actually septuagenarian but definitely Catholic) writer Mary Gordon’s LitHub essay on No One Is Talking About This is “the ethical does not seem to be of much interest to Patricia,” and her grounds for this observation are that anti-abortion advocates might appropriate her treasuring the life of her niece for their hateful cause. This is unfair, especially when Lockwood mentions in the book the material truth that her sister could not have legally accessed abortion care anyway. But more than incorrect, Gordon is wrong. Ethics is the interrogation of how to live in a world with others. This is precisely what Lockwood is interested in. She does not say it directly, but she says it everywhere: Life is precious and strange and funny, and humans are amazing, even — and especially — when we are mentally undone and bodily deranged.
Lockwood’s work is not merely ethical, if we want to get technical about it — it is empathetic. The height of empathy in these pages is found in the narrator’s love of rocks. Crystals, cairns, fossils, gems, and minerals flash throughout the novel. “I had cried at the crystal shop earlier that week because they were wiping all the stones down with alcohol,” she says. “They don’t like that, I had pleaded.” (It’s true. Rocks can’t get sick. “A Quartz contentment,” Dickinson wrote in her poem about suffering and coherence, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes—.”)
I’m reminded of one of my favorite of Lockwood’s iconic sext tweets: “I am Everest and I JO while a 100-year-old grampa tries to climb me. At the moment he reaches my peak I produce a thunderous rockslide.” Her sexts are like Rilke’s Dinggedichte, or Thing Poems. In these poems, Rilke tried to empty out the lyric subject and instead let the object’s inner life speak through the poem. He wanted to know, in the simplest terms, if it was possible to represent a thing. But like the TV Guide photographer who did the cover shoot of Grover and Elliot Gould, Rilke’s Dinggedichte turned out real fuckin’ sexy, just like you asked. Cum gutter Apollo has no arms or legs or any junk at all, yet somehow, he enters you, and he says —
Covid should have changed everything, and yet it didn’t. As American individuals, all we have left is Apollo’s exhortation: You must change your life. Some people changed; others dug down deeper into the selves they were before. March, April, May, June 2020: Those months proved, for better and for much worse, that the way we lived before was not forever. We could do incredible things if we banded together, even with the bottom half of our faces covered: not go to the office, pool our money and get some groceries for a neighbor in need, get a little of our own money back from a government that would rather spend it on the military, recognize the worth of people doing the work that was essential to life, even abolish the fucking police. This is what can happen amid one to three million deaths, in 2020 alone. There was great potential in the togetherness of being alone with ourselves. We had proof in front of us that everything could change — not incrementally, like the liberals want, but maybe even biblically, like conservatives promise will happen yet ignored when it did.
Will There Ever Be Another You dramatizes how we, both individually and socially, repressed our time of fear — not merely of getting sick or experiencing disability but of being changed on any level. “Did a thing to be glimpsed — health, illness, sanity — maintain its solidity from moment to moment,” Lockwood’s narrator asks rhetorically, at the end of the novel, because of course, the answer is no; she’s taken the book to prove it. The book does not indulge in the illness, but simply asks us to remember it, for it will come back again: “Pay attention to the first place you cut yourself, the teacher told us, for you will always cut yourself in the same place again.” Tend to the wound, pay attention to the wound. Be mutable, and it will not be the end.
Will there ever be another you? OH YEAH. There is another you ready to be born, 24/7, if you let life change you.
Natalie Adler is an editor at Lux and the author of the forthcoming novel Waiting on a Friend.
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