‘S
omeone from my lovely publicity team at Bloomsbury said it’s like losing your phone for three weeks...” Patricia Lockwood and I are
discussing what it feels like to read her new semi-autobiographical novel, Will There Ever Be Another You (WTEBAY). By the writer’s own admission, this is no easy task. A slippery, disorientating story penned during the Covid-19 pandemic, WTEBAY is, in the words of its female protagonist, an “attempt to write a masterpiece about confusion”. After contracting the virus, she develops a series of mind-melting neurological symptoms. Reality begins to buckle: floorboards become frightening, an angel can be seen “flapping in the corner” of her eye and Shakespeare’s wife is spotted sipping espresso while “dressed as an equestrian”, writes Lockwood. “She feels like all of her component parts have been disassembled and sent up into the whirlwind,” the poet, essayist and Booker Prize-longlisted novelist says of her fictional counterpart. The only thing keep- ing her on the straight and narrow(ish) is a determination to “put the writing mind back together”. From Lockwood’s own experience, “part of the trouble of trying to write through the pandemic was that it was just your own echoing voice. There was no conversation. You were completely reliant upon this echoing, compounded voice of your own. People became multiplied in themselves… I felt that, in a way, the book was about the process of putting together a self”.
No gin for Lockwood, mind. The writer spent
her post-Covid-19 years soberly searching through the seven notebooks she filled while sick for the bones of WTEBAY. “It is really interesting to have written it as a lunatic, but to have edited it as a sane person,” she observes. Lockwood has no qualms publicly declaring the role her personal life plays in each of her books; the writer’s oeuvre includes the much- lauded memoir Priestdaddy, an account of the year she moved back in with her father, a born- again Catholic priest. If anything, Lockwood explains, maintaining a porous boundary between fiction and fact can be helpful. “If a story arrives in my ear in that fictional voice – if I tell myself it’s fiction – then I do feel freer to write down things that are true. It’s a paradox, right?” she considers. “I’m not the sort of writer who feels the need to draw veils over my work. If anyone asks me what in a particular book is true and what is false, I’ll just tell them.” Lockwood first documented her brain’s
I’m not the sort of writer who feels the need to draw veils over my work. If anyone asks me what in a particular book is true and what is false, I’ll just tell them
It is a strange and unsettling thing to return
to lockdown through fiction. Lockwood’s prose – littered with swab tests, masks, news “of fish and animals shyly returning to natural habitats” – snags on a still-soft wound. Not many novelists, I suggest, have attempted such a direct treatment of the pandemic. “I think that we’ve really attempted to cover
over this time – to shut a door,” Lockwood agrees. “But the reality is that we all went through it together, and even people who didn’t experience what I specifically experienced had some sense of it, I think. With the first pandemic, we swept it under the rug. We were like: ‘Okay, we’re moving directly on to the Roaring Twenties. All of us have lost 40% of our brains and we’re just going to send it straight into dancing the Charleston, living it up.’ It was like bathtub gin and that sort of thing…”
response to the virus in an essay for the London Review of Books, where she is contributing editor, titled Insane After Coronavirus?. WTEBAY is an extended, semi-fictionalised “insanity narrative” based on the same experi- ence. “Reading it afterwards, in a much better state of health and mind, I thought: ‘Wow, this really creates a very accurate clinical picture of this state.’ All of her perceptions, all of her sensory or cognitive distortions, are true…” Despite her penchant for weightier subjects – the pandemic, organised religion (Priestdaddy), the ramifications of being chroni- cally online (No One Is Talking About This) – Lockwood is also expert at the tonal U-turn, often pulling the manoeuvre within a single sentence. “For a moment I was in danger of telling her everything: fear of my floors, the Refrains, how I knew I was separating from the common run because I no longer believed that Meryl Streep could act,” riffs WTEBAY’s protagonist from the therapy couch. “This is the thing that I’m always trying to
present,” says Lockwood on her ability to balance light with dark: “How can life be this 360-degree mirror ball, where you’re seeing all these things at once – all these things coexist- ing?” When I suggest that being able to see the everyday through such a holistic lens is a skill in itself, she demurs that “it’s certainly a muscle that had to be flexed… I feel that sometimes when people choose a lens – this is going to have gravity, or this is going to be hilarious – you put the other side of things in your own blind spot. But if you can just open yourself up like a sieve and let everything rush through, some things are going to catch.” There are times, however, when even
Lockwood has no interest in hearing the punchline: “It was difficult for a lot of poets during the first Trump administration. Because you’re like – wait, is this a completely frivolous thing? Should I be outside, boots on the ground? Is there something concrete I can
Key backlist
Bloomsbury, £8.99, PB, 9781526629777
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2021, Lockwood’s debut novel is “a masterpiece”, said the Guardian.
TCM copies sold
Penguin, £9.99, PB, 9780141984599
Winner of the 2018 Thurber Prize for American Humor.
TCM copies sold
Penguin, £7.99, PB, 9780141984865
“Surreal, funny and subversive,” said the Sunday Times of Lockwood’s second poetry collection.
TCM copies sold
be doing? A lot of the people I know and knew who write poetry, a lot of us slowed down at that time.” It took a moment of almost divine inspiration for Lockwood, who tells me she considers poetry her most grounding medium, to feel her way back to verse. “I started writing this Sylvia Plath piece for the London Review of Books, and I was doing all of my background reading, and about halfway through reading her collected poems, I just picked up my pen – it was like I was suddenly hearing a radio station – and started to write poetry again. In the middle of writing this essay, I wrote an entire collection,” she marvels, telling me with endear- ing glee that this had not happened before, or since. During Trump’s current second presidential term – “Oh God,” Lockwood groans – she has chosen to travel in a different direction entirely: back to prose, and back in time. Set in 1947, Lockwood’s next novel is a historical fantasy exploring the “great post-war flowering of the arts”. Not what you would expect from a writer who ordinarily chooses to home in on reality, not create an alternate version of it. “I’m going to give it a whirl – to off-balance
people,” she laughs: “Sometimes it’s just fun to build a world – more fun than having to build on paper the world that we live in.” Once again, balancing light with dark.
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GREP HOAX
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