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Patricia Lockwood
Will There Ever Be Another You
Will There Ever Be Another You
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From one of our most original, inventive and prodigiously funny writers, Will There Ever Be Another You is a phosphorescent, wild and profound investigation into what keeps us alive in unprecedented times.
Susan's review
American writer Patricia Lockwood’s new novel Will There Ever Be Another You has all the features of her previous publications: emotional immediacy, intellectual provocation, formal experimentation, and an intense concern with the life of the suffering body. Her confronting poem ‘Rape Joke,’ published online in 2017, quickly went viral, while her unmissable memoir Priestdaddy is a vivid portrait of a nakedly guitar-wielding yet morally conservative priest-father. Lockwood’s next book, No One is Talking About This (2012), remains one of my favourite contemporary novels for its existentially profound contrast between two different ways of being in the world: the surface self of the narcissistic online blogger and the self who, in helping to care for a baby with a rare and disabling medical condition, comes to understand the need to look beyond that surface, and discover a capacity for selfless love. Both experiences are based on Lockwood’s own experiences as a highly popular social influencer and a privately devoted sister and aunt.
Lockwood’s new novel is also semi-autobiographical, based on her calamitous experience of long covid. Its first-person narrator evokes the ways in which alarming physical and neurological symptoms renders her alien to what she once considered her ‘normal’ and knowable self. The narrator often represents her illness as a kind of impostor or thief: what she describes in an essay in The London Review of Books as “the thing that the self had been replaced by.” What began as bewildering physical symptoms – burning or numbed hands, skin bristling with pain, twinges in the thumb and the base of the neck – soon becomes frighteningly neurological: the collapse of memory, the jumbling of syntax, the wrong choice of words. For a writer, the loss of control of language was especially distressing. The narrator’s fear of a loss of creativity and the means with which to express it also haunts Virginia Woolf’s brilliant essay ‘On Being Ill’ (1926), which describes the unravelling of her consciousness after her mental breakdowns. Lockwood’s novel has other affinities with Woolf’s essay. One is the use of a stream-of-consciousness style and a fragmented narrative to re-imagine, rather than merely describe, this devastating sense of a neurologically disabled self. As well, both books deal with the attempt to find a language with which to describe the highly subjective and intensely isolating experience of prolonged pain; one which, by definition, seems to elude language itself. This writerly dilemma also afflicts the mind of the narrator of WA author Josephine Taylor’s enthralling novel Eye of a Rook, as she desperately searches for the “right” metaphor with which to express her excruciating gynaecological pain: “Inside out. Lashed to a rack. Glistening innards and frayed nerves. Prisoner. Torturer. Which am I? Where am I?” The very excess of metaphors here suggests the impossibility of communicating the reality of pain to others, even those who love us.
Paradoxically for a book about pain, Lockwood’s new novel is one of the most invigorating accounts of illness I’ve ever read. There’s no one quite like Lockwood for combining confronting details with humour; for writing with what New Yorker critic Alexandra Shwartz mischievously calls “the impish verve and provocative guilelessness of a peeing cupid.” And while Will There Be Another You probably won’t appeal to readers who prefer straightforward narratives, its use of formal experimentation asks us to imaginatively inhabit physical and psychic spaces that for many of us are mercifully unknown. In this way, Lockwood strives to bridge the chasm between what the narrator of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby declares is the “profound [difference] between the sick and the well.” Will There Be Another You helps us understand the torment of losing one’s sense of existential grounding, and the arduous road to the recovery of a writerly self. It also, and importantly, provides “the sick” with the consolation of knowing that their experience has been respected. On both counts, the novel is an enlivening and illuminating read.
Will There Be Another You will be available at the Lane Bookshop in late September/early October. You’re welcome to pre-order a copy.
Publisher Review
THE NEW NOVEL FROM THE AUTHOR OF NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT THIS, WINNER OF THE DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE AND THE ONLY BOOK SHORTLISTED FOR BOTH THE 2021 BOOKER PRIZE AND WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION
The world might be in disarray, but for one young woman, the very weave of herself seems to have loosened. Time and memories pass straight through her body, she's afraid of her own floorboards, and the lyrics of 'What Is Love' play over and over in her ears. 'I'm sorry not to respond to your email,' she writes, 'but I live completely in the present now.'
Tearing through the slippery terrains of fiction and reality, the possibility for human connection seems to beckon from the other side – and with it, the chance for a blinding re-emergence into the world.
From one of our most original, inventive and prodigiously funny writers, Will There Ever Be Another You is a phosphorescent, wild and profound investigation into what keeps us alive in unprecedented times.
Praise for Patricia Lockwood and No One Is Talking About This
'Patricia Lockwood is the voice of a generation' Namita Gokhale
'I really admire and love this book' Sally Rooney
'I can't remember the last time I laughed so much reading a book' David Sedaris
'A rare wonder . . . I was left in bits' Douglas Stuart
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