“A book especially tried to force you to see things, try to breed you, in short, like a sunflower,” Patricia Lockwood writes. Her new autofictional novel — following her memoir Priestdaddy and 2021 Booker Prize shortlisted No One is Talking About This — does indeed try to force you to see things, particularly the distracted precarity brought on by her experience of long Covid and its muddling effects. In Will There Ever Be Another You, the protagonist struggles with the evergreen mind/body dilemma in so disconcerting and elliptical a fashion that it makes the reader feel rudderless too.

In Will There Ever Be Another You, the American author coaxes readers to slip into her peculiar headspace, which is bewildering, abstract, and funny. Case in point: on one occasion she posits that “maybe Monet just couldn’t see that well”. Throughout her work, Lockwood invites people into her world not just to indulge in the facets and farces of her own life, but as a means of encouraging readers to look deeply at themselves.

We spoke with Lockwood about Virginia Woolf’s headaches, illness writing, and her experience of long Covid.

So! The protagonist says: ‘I was going to write a masterpiece about being confused.’

Patricia Lockwood: I kept putting that line in and taking it out because I was like, ‘Well, it’s a little on the nose, but at the same time, give the people a tagline, right?’ There’s just something very funny about it. It’s like, if you’re swimming through the world locked in your own perceptions, not really able to touch anything concrete anywhere, why are you trying to write about it? There’s something very hopeful, I think, in the idea of this persisting self.

You address the idea of illness being perceived as self-indulgent. How did you decide to explore this topic? 

Patricia Lockwood: Illness writing, historically, has been relegated to the women’s sphere. In a lot of illness books, you’re trying to be authoritative, clinical, dry, use the doctor’s language, so that people don’t just say that you're making it up or imagining it or that it’s all in your head. But I really liked the idea of going forward with this, without worrying about people believing me — that felt a little bit more dangerous, a little bit more of a high wire act.

Because the women’s sphere is still not considered a credible source?

Patricia Lockwood: I mean, you certainly experience it with certain doctors. I had a number of doctors who were extremely helpful — and then you had other ones that were literally like, ‘you don’t have a brain tumour, get out of my office’. This is more complicated, because if you go back to something like Virginia Woolf’s headaches, for instance, there’s almost a sense in which these things were taken more seriously. In the past, nerves were taken seriously, breakdowns were taken seriously. Head pain was considered a serious thing. I think with the discovery that the mind is part of the body has come this belief that anything that is happening to you, you’re doing to yourself, right? I think we really went backwards in certain things, in the treatments of these illnesses, particularly with things that are more nebulous, things like chronic fatigue syndrome, post-viral states. In a lot of cases, they do disproportionately affect women, and I think that that really can affect funding research, how seriously they’re taken. Maybe Freud did this to us. He did a lot of shit to us. 

Given the devotion of your readership from previous work, why would you fear their scepticism? 

Patricia Lockwood: In a way, I think you just always worry about it. These are the voices in your head. I believe the line is: ‘if to write about being ill was self-indulgent, what followed was that the most self-indulgent thing of all was to be ill.’ When you talk to people about this, no one cares what vitamins I’m taking, or what my fever is every afternoon. To a certain extent, I’m boring myself too as I’m telling you these things, right? So it’s something that you are worrying about yourself for sure, and in the midst of something like this, the readership is not on your mind. They floated very far out to sea. It was only fairly recently, when I started to be back in rooms doing readings from this book or lecturing about it, that you did look out at the crowd and think, ‘oh my gosh, they do believe me!’

[Writing] was like swimming through syrup or training for a marathon with weights on

I like the anecdote in the book about comedian Garry Shandling: after an accident, he hears a voice that says, ‘Do you want to continue living Gary Shandling’s life?’. Illness forces you to be decisive afresh about who you are. Can you talk about this idea of re-committing to your life in another way?

Patricia Lockwood: I think that’s very well put. At a certain point, that is what it felt like: choosing to live your life, or continuing to live your life. It’s such a great anecdote, specifically a voice from on high coming to you after a car accident, and using your name. It’s like you can have this formless life that is completely unlabeled. But do you want to continue living Gary Shandling’s life? You look at yourself with that sense of strangeness: you look at your own name that way. And there is something that you’re turning over and over in your head: is this Patricia Lockwood’s life? Do you want to continue living it?

There were references within the book to this person who was helping you with an adaptation of your memoir, adding this meta-textual layer. Can you talk about integrating the adaptation into the novel?

Patricia Lockwood: I layered that in slowly… We were adapting Priestdaddy, and we had started that process. Gosh, even before all of those events from No One is Talking About This had transpired, we were already working on it. It was a long haul. And then we had finished the pilot just before the pandemic. And then enter the pandemic: nothing is being developed. You’re doing all of this over the phone, which is a very strange experience too. There’s a reason for her to be observing her own life in this way. There’s a lot threaded through about acting, performing a self, doppelgangers, twins — all of these things are there. So it was like, ‘oh, of course, this is a part of the narrative’. 

In terms of the adaptation itself, where are things at? 

Patricia Lockwood: Oh, it was never picked up. It was very, very difficult for things to get developed and made when you were still in the pandemic period. But also, I was relieved. You just see this unbroken stretch before you of, oh God, every phone call, every visit home, every anecdote: all of that somehow then has to be transmuted into this thing for public viewing, public consumption. A television show is very different than a novel. A novel is more private. It happens between minds — at least, that’s how it feels to me. 

Having undergone physical hardships, how did that change your process as a writer? There’s this one line: ‘it wasn’t exactly the way I wrote before’.

Patricia Lockwood: It felt more like something you were manually putting together, word by word. Previously, I would say I’m a sentence cobbler. I performed very slow addition with sentences. But in this case, it was really like, ‘OK, my hands knew how to do this once. I’m going to pick up this bolt over here, this screw over here, I’m going to put them together’. And then you have the strange experience of people reading it, or hearing you read from it, and being like, ‘yeah, that sounds like her’. Because at the time, it doesn’t — you think you’re really doing it differently, and maybe you are. I would say that after getting my situation a little bit more under control, I do feel that I sound like myself again, or that I’m working more like myself, but it was like swimming through syrup or training for a marathon with weights on. Your brain knew how to do it if you could only get there. And part of what you see in those sentences is just that reaching: this is something that you know how to do.

Where are you at today? Is that behind you? Are you still struggling to some degree?

Patricia Lockwood: I do tend to have my problems, but it is so much better. In the novel, it’s really an epilogue, and it happens in Key West. She’s back to herself, and she just looks around like, ‘well, what the fuck was that?’ [laughs]. It’s this very slow process of putting together information when you’re a person who has a hard time understanding the physical state. Soon after I was ill in 2020, I didn’t realise the vast extent of the symptoms, or that it could be responsible for things that were so strange that I really thought ‘OK, I guess that's what my brain is like now’. And once you figure that out, and once you get treatment, you’re like, ‘oh, whoa. This was a system that was stretching over my entire experience and perception’. 

So I would say that now it is much, much better. I do feel like myself when I write; I feel that it sounds like me — but I think if you’re just forthcoming too about the fact that sometimes you are hindered or compromised or a little bit in wonderland, people will meet you where you are.

A television show is very different than a novel. A novel is more private. It happens between minds

You blend cultural references: Tolstoy and Anne Carson, but also Stephen Sondheim and the Golden Girls. There’s a real spectrum. Can you talk about the breadth of your cultural consumption and how that funnels its way into the book? 

Patricia Lockwood: Well, particularly in the period of lockdown, people were really trapped alone in their homes with their media, right? And that could be highbrow, or it could be disaster movies. It was all happening on the same plane. At that time, it felt like you had to ‘get into stuff’ in order to provide some sort of narrative shape to your days. So it would be like, ‘all right, Dante’s Peak: let’s watch those teens get boiled alive in that scalding spring’ or whatever. And after [the protagonist’s] husband has a near-death experience, they watch The Golden Girls… I feel that has ascended into canon.

True! There’s this line that seems to crystallise a lot of the writing that you do. The protagonist says, ‘I have come to welcome anything so strange, I will remember it.’ It does seem like you gleefully gather strange things.

Patricia Lockwood: I like to collect absurdities and things that other people don’t notice. I’m always flabbergasted. Those are the things that I look at more than the normal things. And I’ve made a kind of effort in the poems I’ve been writing recently to include these conversations, these bits of dialogue. If there’s one thing that distinguishes my writing, it’s that I like to put in those really specific things. I like to put in direct lines of dialogue, because that’s how people sound like themselves. 

Is there any strange thing that you’ve collected recently that struck you?

Patricia Lockwood: Let me flip through my notebook. Eventually, all of these things are going to be going in poems. All I can think of was the Dutch guy in a thong banana hammock that we saw the other day at Boneyard Beach. You would think that everyone would have noticed him, particularly for banana hammock reasons. I’m the person who has to bring the Dutch guy in the thong banana hammock to the people.

And we’re grateful! There’s a line about how ‘the end was an oasis you never wanted to reach. The best version was when you were in it, and all the components were in a hurricane.’ How do you know where to conclude?

Patricia Lockwood: Poems are easier. A novel can really just, like, go on forever, as we have learned. It is harder to know, writing through them. No One is Talking About This had a fairly natural endpoint, I feel. And this one had a fairly natural endpoint too. In the middle of it, I never felt I was going to reach that place. I’m sure that there are writers out there who really enjoy the publication process and holding that finished work in their hands. I don’t. I want to be in the whirlwind, in that process of composition. That’s really where anything can happen, where you feel exhilarated — where I personally always want to remain.

Will There Ever Be Another You is available now.