In her new novel Will There Ever Be Another You, which chronicles her experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, literary icon Patricia Lockwood writes, “‘Please don’t write about it,’ people were already begging each other, so she kept the notebook secret.”
As fiction readers know, authors have largely shied away from describing the COVID-19 pandemic in detail, while Long COVID has barely even been mentioned. But Lockwood takes on both subjects in this bracing autobiographical novel, capturing both the symptoms of Long COVID and the surreal experience of living in America during the early pandemic in vivid detail.
Will There Ever Be Another You is written from inside the mind of someone suffering from neurological symptoms of Long COVID, and does not provide a clear timeline or list of symptoms. The reader can infer, however, that the main character, a stand-in for Lockwood, caught COVID early in 2020 like many first wavers, and that her case lingered and developed into Long COVID over the subsequent months.
“She had now had a fever for forty-eight days,” she writes early on in the book, describing other physical symptoms, such as postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), in subsequent pages. In addition to experiencing aphasia, the narrator feels her memory is affected more broadly, though not always in a purely negative way: “Had the sickness blazed new pathways [in her mind] and cast light on old tangled ones?” she muses. “If she never formed another memory, then nothing could ever happen to her.”
Readers who live with Long COVID may be put off by the fact that Lockwood does not name her condition in the text. Yet the specificity with which she renders both her experience of the illness as well as the surreal landscape of 2020 fully grounds this book in the COVID-19 pandemic and Long COVID. Over the course of the novel, Lockwood discusses masking, her rage at her parents for failing to mask or get vaccinated, the lab leak theory, “nature is healing” memes, and a worldwide bucatini shortage — along with the “lingering effects of the virus.”
Lockwood’s portrait of the narrator’s experience of Long COVID is so vivid that, even without having named it herself, the vast majority of reviews, including at the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Slate, have referred to the book as a “Long COVID” novel.
Lockwood’s condition has improved since her initial infection, but she does continue to experience symptoms, as she told The New Yorker for a recent profile. In that piece, she explained that she “wrote [the novel] insane, and edited it sane,” composing the text during the peak of her illness and editing it once she felt more psychologically grounded.
This collaboration between two versions of Lockwood has yielded an unsettlingly evocative picture of the experience of Long COVID. While my specific experience of Long COVID does not neatly mirror Lockwood’s, any serious case of the illness is likely to make you feel strangely disconnected from your body and the world. Lockwood captures this bizarre and sometimes frightening sensation of losing touch with what we previously understood.
As Lockwood identifies in her novel, fiction writers have been leery of writing about COVID-19 from the inception of the pandemic. Lucyl Harrison, a researcher investigating COVID-19 literature, explained to me, “Owing to the sheer despair of our current world and the want to move on from the pandemic, this type of writing lacks marketability.”
Publishers continue to avoid acquiring COVID-19 literature, while fiction has ignored Long COVID almost entirely. As a literary critic with Long COVID, I’ve been on the lookout for books on this subject, carefully reading publishers’ catalogs of new releases and urging publicists to tell me about new titles that explore any form of disability. Yet over the past three years, since I first developed Long COVID, I’ve only managed to find a handful of titles.
This is hardly surprising, given how much stigma people with Long COVID experience: references to COVID-19 and especially to Long COVID, in life and in art, remind people that the pandemic never really ended. But for people like Lockwood and for me, who were both debilitated by Long COVID, forgetting is impossible.
Although serious depictions of COVID-19 remain rare, Lockwood is not the only person to write about the pandemic’s first year. Some authors have tackled the subject head-on despite publisher and reader apathy: this year, in her novel Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng, Kylie Lee Baker uses Chinese mythology and horror tropes to tackle anti-Asian hate in 2020, while J. B. Hwang drew upon her experience working as a postal worker in the same period to write Mendell Station.
References to COVID-19 and especially to Long COVID, in life and in art, remind people that the pandemic never really ended. But for people like Lockwood and for me, who were both debilitated by Long COVID, forgetting is impossible.
Harrison also hosts the Pandemic Pages podcast, where she’s interviewed many authors about their COVID-inflected work, and is keen to remind me that “novels written as a response and/or during [the early pandemic] have won prestigious awards such as the Booker Prize. If you read COVID fiction, you encounter a vibrantly varied genre.”
This genre, however, tends to focus on social experiences of the pandemic, rather than experiences of the illness itself, and has — crucially — almost totally ignored Long COVID. Last year, Kate Weinberg published There’s Nothing Wrong With Her, which was advertised as the first Long COVID novel despite avoiding specific references to the pandemic.
In a publishing landscape hostile to fiction about COVID-19, and especially Long COVID, Lockwood’s clout made her perhaps the perfect person to write this novel: She is one of only a few authors working today who can honestly be described as a literary star. Having emerged as a Twitter celebrity in the 2010s, popular for her surreal and profane posts, Lockwood ascended to the literary firmament in 2017 with her highly acclaimed memoir Priestdaddy, which was named one of The New York Times’ 10 Best Books of the Year. Her 2021 novel, No One Is Talking About This, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, further cemented her status, as has her superb and vivid writing for the London Review of Books — where she also first documented her experience of Long COVID.
Lockwood’s frank recounting of her Long COVID experience is an important step forward in creative depictions of the disease, even though the book does not name the illness. While she broadly avoids medical specifics, it’s clear that Lockwood has given the subject of COVID-19 fiction a great deal of thought. She explicitly addresses the ambivalence around COVID-19 literature in the novel: In addition to people telling her main character to “not write about it,” she also reflects, “The defining events of their time — 9/11, for instance — had never properly entered into literature, because almost as soon as they happened they were transformed into propaganda. … Perhaps the illness would be like that too.”
Instead of letting COVID-19 languish and fade into obscurity, Will There Ever Be Another You is Lockwood’s effort to memorialize not only COVID-19 itself but the surreal space of her mind during her illness.
In keeping with its protagonist’s mental confusion, Will There Ever Be Another You is a strange, elliptical novel that isn’t always easy to follow. Lockwood uses scattered, searching prose to explore the depths of her protagonist’s mind, and perhaps inevitably, certain sections of the book can feel opaque: as I was reading, I found myself thinking that these sections were surely more interesting and comprehensible inside Lockwood’s mind than to any reader.
But the novel’s opacity is probably inevitable from a novel so deeply concerned with psychological confusion. She writes, “‘If you are not yourself,’ the doctor in her mind asked, gently, ‘then who are you?’” This question animates both her novel and the inner lives of countless people whose lives have been sent spinning off course by Long COVID and other chronic illnesses.
In Lockwood’s quest to illustrate that question, she dispenses with all traditional forms of narrative structure. As she told The New Yorker, she would rather call Will There Ever Be Another You a “pineapple” or “chandelier” than a novel: “a revolving object that you’re seeing all sides of at once.”
This fragmented and discursive structure can feel liberating, as though Lockwood has cast off tradition in order to more accurately convey what her mind was doing at the height of her illness: the fluid associations she makes can be read as a form of Long COVID storytelling. But the effects can also be confusing and meandering, especially for readers who, like Lockwood herself at points in this book, struggle to focus or understand words on the page.
But Lockwood doesn’t seem to care that her novel can be confusing, and she also knows that to some readers, her project of describing the inner experience of Long COVID could not be more unappealing. When people ask the narrator what she’s working on, she evades them, observing acerbically, “If to write about being ill was self-indulgent, what followed was that the most self-indulgent thing of all was to be ill,” the protagonist observes. She is, however, determined to flout this conventional, and ableist, wisdom, continuing: “But I was determined to do it. I was going to write a masterpiece about being confused.”
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.
Patricia Lockwood, Will There Ever Be Another You
As a fellow sick person, I felt a sense of gleeful satisfaction reading these words. Lockwood’s narrator knows her brain is not working entirely correctly, but she resolves to describe her experience in fiction anyway. The book Lockwood has produced, which is indeed a masterpiece of confusion and disorientation, will no doubt confuse the reader at times, too. But a reader who is willing to be swept up in Lockwood’s current will be rewarded.
Yet even as the protagonist is determined to chronicle her experience, that illness partly manifests as a feeling of literal fraudulence: “How to say this — that everything felt like drag to her? All clothes, her eyelashes, the fact that she had hands. In her notebook she had written, ‘Even to have a name seems strange to me.’”
Though Lockwood is describing alarming neurological issues, I couldn’t help but read this passage as a metaphor for a feeling universal to those beset by severe illness and disability: that our former identities and lives have been stolen away and replaced by something unfamiliar, and that others suspect we are faking (reveling, for instance, in the “indulgence” of illness).
In addition to exploring her own experience of Long COVID in Will There Ever Be Another You, Lockwood’s narrator is awed by the fragility of the human body when her husband, Jason, suffers a life-threatening abdominal injury and needs major surgery. She becomes his caretaker, reversing their positions and allowing her to see physical frailty from the outside. In the wake of both these ailments, she reflects, “Any damage to the human body now seemed so personal.”
Few fiction writers take the precarity of health and the body so seriously, and, as I’ve already said, no major novel has addressed the experience of Long COVID through fiction with such care and attention. Hopefully, this book will lead to more novels that seriously explore Long COVID: while Lockwood’s position in the literary world is privileged, she is hardly the only writer to have experienced the illness.
Writers without Long COVID should also learn from her example. As Lockwood shows so powerfully in the novel, our bodies, our minds, and the lives that encompass them are fragile and prone to collapse at any moment. It can be hard for healthy people who haven’t experienced the kind of illness, or proximity to illness, that Lockwood has to understand this fragility on a visceral level, but in a world where disability and chronic illness are increasingly common, more writers should try.
The task of fiction is to open up these experiences for others, and hopefully, Will There Ever Be Another You will do this for its readers. Given the stigma that surrounds Long COVID, Lockwood’s unfailingly honest account of her experience, and her willingness to use her privileged position to tell this story, is brave. How fortunate that she toiled through the worst periods of her illness to bring it to us, driven by the writer’s calling to “write everything down.”
How fortunate that she toiled through the worst periods of her illness to bring it to us, driven by the writer’s calling to “write everything down.”
Morgan Leigh Davies is a writer whose work has appeared in publications including The Sewanee Review, Jezebel, Electric Lit, LARB, and more. She has Long COVID and other chronic illnesses and lives in Brooklyn with her cats.
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