Will There Ever Be Another You by Patricia Lockwood review – long Covid from the inside

<p>The cult author’s autofictional follow-up to No One Is Talking About This is the story of a breakdown</p><p>It sounds like the setup to a joke: a viral author and a global virus walk into a novel. The punchline is long Covid, an illness that defies narrative – dissolves it. Patricia Lockwood’s new autofiction, Will There Ever Be Another You, is the product of that cruel dissolution. “I&nbsp;wrote it insane, and edited it sane,” she explained in a recent interview. The madness is the method. But must you know the mind before you can know the madness?</p><p>Lockwood is the literary Frankenchild of Dorothy Parker and Flannery O’Connor: a heretical wit fused with gothic strangeness, vintage quippery rewired for the digital age. She’s the kind of writer who inspires parasocial devotion and copycat haircuts. Even her cats are internet-famous. The sacred text of Lockwood lore is <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/27/priestdaddy-by-patricia-lockwood-review">Priestdaddy</a>, her glorious 2017 memoir, which introduced readers to the American author’s trouser-resistant father, an ordained Catholic priest who blew his daughter’s college fund on a vintage guitar.</p><p>“What are you working on?” people kept asking me. Little stories, I would evade, and leave it at that, 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. But I was determined to do it. I was going to write a masterpiece about being confused.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/sep/23/will-there-ever-be-another-you-by-patricia-lockwood-review-long-covid-from-the-inside">Continue reading...</a>