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. More recently, books such as Lisa Olstein’s Pain Studies and Meghan O’Rourke’s The Invisible Kingdom have examined the uncertainty of chronic illness. What does another entry into the canon of sickness writing have to offer readers?
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. Lockwood does happen to be an accomplished poet as well as a devotee of internet speak, with its oddly revealing turns of phrase. Here, her deft manipulation of form and language captures how alien—even, perhaps, how interesting—ordinary life with a chronic illness, in some cases, can be.
Toggling between the first and third person, Will There Ever Be Another You follows a writer named Patricia, who bears a very close resemblance to Lockwood, as she contracts the coronavirus early in the pandemic and deals with COVID’s lingering effects for the next four years. (Lockwood has written previously about a number of the events that appear in fictionalized form in the novel.) The narrator has published a lauded book about the internet (what she calls “the portal”), much like Lockwood’s first novel, No One Is Talking About This. Also like Lockwood, the narrator is working with a playwright to adapt a story about her family into a television series. (Lockwood’s memoir, Priestdaddy, was optioned in 2017 but has not been produced.)
In prose tinged with Woolf’s influence (she and Lockwood both love to begin sentences with a conjunction, creating pattering rhythms), the novel begins with the narrator visiting the Isle of Skye, off the western coast of Scotland, with her family. She drinks from the Fairy Pools, a popular tourist attraction of natural water formations, and gets horribly sick; the narrator’s sister loses her phone, which holds photos of her recently deceased daughter. These bad omens create a foreboding sense in the narrator that she has somehow misstepped by sipping the water, exacting a price that must later be paid.
To say that the narrator’s descent into COVID in the next chapter is the price feels a bit too tidy. But this kind of self-interrogation, even self-mythologizing, undergirds many stories of illness: How did I get here? Did I somehow invite this upon myself? In Lockwood’s book, the illness never resolves, neither through healing nor in death. Instead, she dwells in the long middle of being sick. The narrator develops a fever that lasts for 48 days, her memory is shattered, she is unable to recognize faces, and she experiences alien hand syndrome, which she describes colorfully as “the rough pink sensation that she was holding Rasputin’s penis in her right hand.”
The narrator’s experience of long COVID leaves her feeling like a different person than she was before she got sick. Along with being physically ill, she cannot think, read, or write the way she used to. She visits doctor after doctor, reads post after post on the internet, searching for clarity: “Sometimes she sat at the foot of the illness and asked it questions. Had it stolen her old mind and given her a new one? Had she been able to start over from scratch, a chance afforded to very few people? Had it optimized her?” This deep curiosity about what is happening to her makes Lockwood’s illness account feel particularly open-minded. It is also what makes a neurologist “recoil” from the narrator after seeing her reaction to her brain scans. “This was a cardinal sin,” she reflects afterward. “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.” Like a changeling—a motif that recurs throughout the novel—the old narrator has been taken and replaced by someone new.
Part Two of the novel includes excerpts from the “mad notebook” that the narrator keeps during the pandemic and its aftermath: “‘Some days the delirium seems to return. It feels expansive, uncomfortable, as if pathways are trying to break past the outer walls.’ ‘Solid objects seem to rain.’ ‘My reading comes and goes like a magic store.’” In one chapter called “Mr. Tolstoy, You’re Driving Me Mad,” an imagined Beatles song title, the narrator recounts her attempts “to rewire my brain with mushrooms,” which instead result in her “becoming temporarily psychic and reading Anna Karenina so hard I almost died.”
Long COVID seems to defamiliarize the narrator’s relationship to language in ways both fascinating and isolating. In one scene, she invents the word ranchously to describe herself scampering zestily away from a stranger. The odd, sometimes astute connections and ideas her seemingly new brain forms are not entirely unpleasant. But there is also acute loss: After the narrator contracts COVID, her photographic memory for faces disappears. She is able to distinguish faces only when she watches Korean dramas, whose characters are untethered to the English language that confounds her. “The inability to process narrative, my disorientation at fast cuts, the unzipping inside my skull whenever the camera moved diagonally,” she reflects—“all of these went away.”
At the end of Part Two, the narrator and her husband travel to London for an awards ceremony. While they’re watching the popular K-drama Crash Landing on You on the plane, her husband doubles over, and once they land, he is rushed from Heathrow to a hospital. He is later diagnosed with multiple hemorrhages. Part Three describes what happens after his medical emergency, and the strange new cadence of their life together. After her husband undergoes several surgeries and returns home, the narrator cares for him, tender and a little maniacal about her duty to “the Wound”: “So that’s what the inside of her husband looked like,” she thinks. “Red layers, a taut opening, and a sort of inner glistening. A shape like a buttonhole, and ‘You missed one,’ she might have said, had it been anything other than himself.” She closely observes the Wound’s healing, finding purpose and solidity in her husband’s progress.
Late in the novel, the narrator begins taking metalwork classes, hoping to make something out of the items she’s always collected—stones, crystals, scraps of silver. In one scene during the early months of the pandemic, she cries while at a crystal shop, watching the clerk disinfect the stones with alcohol: “They don’t like that,” she pleads, feeling the sting in her own sick body. At the end of the novel, it’s unclear how much of that referred sensation has disappeared: The narrator still deals with many long-COVID symptoms. But she learns to melt metal, craft settings for her stones, and enjoy an artistic process that does not demand language. Her husband, healthy again (though dealing with his own chronic symptoms), picks her up from class at night, looking over her metal creations in the way he used to review her poems after the couple had spent a day apart.
One particular challenge of an illness narrative—especially one that’s ongoing—is how to conclude. Lockwood, for one, refuses to sum her story up neatly. She doesn’t need to: Her narrator’s life continues. (“There are things that are happening in her life even now,” her TV show’s co-writer says when asked about a potential second season of the show.) Lockwood is an alchemist, handling her own experiences with careful attention, ready to fashion them into something new.
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