Priestdaddy<\/a>,\u201d evokes the pandemic\u2019s long tail in her expressionistic autofiction, \u201cWill There Ever Be Another You,\u201d recounting mind-altering effects on her protagonist, \u201cPatricia,\u201d as she and her husband quarantine in Savannah, Ga., during the initial 2020 outbreak and subsequent surges. A writer, Patricia published a confessional work about her family that she is adapting into a screenplay; as her extended illness kicks in, she finds it difficult to craft anything of merit. She writes snatches of description and dialogue in her journal, but when she reads them later, her words jumble like hieroglyphs. She\u2019s distracted by intrusive thoughts, sentence fragments, out-of-the-blue hallucinations, even her own fraught relationships, placing the blame on SARS-CoV-2: \u201cIt has come all this way, she thought, cradling the thing in her chest; has passed through the hands of invention or chance, white lab coats, wet markets, the gates of the zoo \u2026 to land in her squarely, like love!\u201d Like Sylvia Plath in her superb poem, \u201cFever 103,\u201d Patricia struggles with fluctuating temperatures and a sluggishness she connects to her art: \u201cIn a story, fever was something that moved you along, sped up time, or made it different, parted the curtain for some ray of revelation \u2014 perhaps that\u2019s why the world had decided to have one, so it could have a dream in which all the people were there.\u201d<\/p>\n\u201cWill There Ever Be Another You\u201d drapes a veil over a throughline \u2014 occasionally it seems Lockwood has trashed the concept of narrative arc in a fit of pique, as she leaps from setting to setting (Scotland, Cincinnati, coastal Georgia), with uneven results. The action is blurred, her characters faceless as mannequins. Patricia\u2019s husband intervenes valiantly to help her, lending color and wit to her predicament, but we suspect he can\u2019t save her. There are fixed points, though: hospitals, religious anguish, scenes with her quirky family, a fierce desire to reclaim her writing life. They add up to an erasure of self, its meaning elusive: \u201cThis was a cardinal sin; 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 the self was replaced by.\u201d<\/p>\n
From chapter to chapter, Lockwood deploys an associative strategy: anecdotes, memories and social commentary string together, rich and kinetic if confusing. Patricia is both invested in and disengaged from her own mental health and her husband\u2019s medical challenges. Motifs of motherhood shift in and out of view; are the tragedies actual or fever-fantasy? Some jokes hit their marks; others fall flat. Lockwood piles on literary and popular culture references. William Carlos Williams, \u201cAnna Karenina,\u201d Katherine Anne Porter, \u201cMrs. Doubtfire,\u201d \u201cCats,\u201d Foghorn Leghorn: all get shoutouts here, a collective distress call that fails to move us. Patricia also bogs down in the details of translating her earlier book into a Hollywood screenplay, with Kurt Russell keen on the part of her father. Americans: We worship celebrity.<\/p>\n
![\"Patricia](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/1758596481_864_\")
<\/p>\n
Patricia Lockwood, poet and author of the prizewinning memoir \u201cPriestdaddy,\u201d evokes the COVID-19 pandemic\u2019s long tail in her expressionistic autofiction, \u201cWill There Ever Be Another You.\u201d<\/p>\n
(Grep Hoax)<\/p>\n
\u201cWill There Ever Be Another You\u201d is a portrait of one woman\u2019s crisis, not unlike Plath\u2019s \u201cThe Bell Jar,\u201d but without her clarity and acerbic confidence. Lockwood depicts the trajectory of illness through the kind of surrealism that sparked Plath\u2019s \u201cAriel\u201d; so much depends on how well you absorb the loony-tune Lockwood croons. Patricia enrolls in a welding class as therapy, prompting a bit of internal monologue: \u201cI melted. I could put a spleen back in a human body. Little bodies, drops of overflow. Something began to spin, the sun was coming out. Creatures and plants were raised upon the earth.\u201d A reader\u2019s patience may wear thin. And yet there are moments of startling beauty, such as Patricia\u2019s observation during lockdown, when the natural world took back its turf from us: \u201cWe are the plague, people had said at the beginning, rejoicing over pictures of empty streets, of fish and animals shyly returning to natural habitats \u2014 and the further she was removed from the world, the more that she felt it was true, that Nature was healing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Experimental authors continue to push beyond the boundaries of American realism \u2014 Ed Park, Jane Alison and Mark Z. Danielewski come to mind \u2014 and at her best Lockwood plays with harmony and dissonance in unexpected, exhilarating ways. She illuminates long COVID, which has rattled the lives of so many. Her meditations on family and loss resonate. But it\u2019s tough to shake the impression that the book\u2019s grand quest, Patricia\u2019s attempt to rescue a self, is self-indulgent and repetitious, spiraling to earth as it tries to soar. \u201cWill There Ever Be Another You\u201d is a mixed bag; readers must sift through \u201cclods\u201d of ornate prose to pluck nuggets of gold.<\/p>\n
Cain is a book critic and the author of a memoir, \u201cThis Boy\u2019s Faith: Notes from a Southern Baptist Upbringing.\u201d He lives in Brooklyn, New York.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Book Review Will There Ever Be Another You By Patricia LockwoodRiverhead: 256 pages, $29 If you buy books…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":37833,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[8239,13851,2108,489,1596,17389,34763,156,2109,34761,3192,9462,111,139,69,34764,34760,5100,34762,377],"class_list":["post-37832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-books","tag-american","tag-author","tag-book","tag-books","tag-brain","tag-covid-19-pandemic","tag-dialogue","tag-entertainment","tag-family","tag-husband-quarantine","tag-illness","tag-memoir","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-other-organ","tag-patricia-lockwood","tag-self","tag-sylvia-plath","tag-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37832"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37832\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}