The story of Patricia Lockwood’s ascent to literary stardom sounds as though it’s from another age, and in many ways it is. From 2011 the then 29-year-old garnered fans on the platform then known as Twitter for her idiosyncratic posts, which included her parodies of sexts (“I am a Dan Brown novel and you do me in my plot-hole. ‘Wow,’ I yell in ecstasy, ‘This makes no sense at all’”) and the simple provocation of a literary journal (“@parisreview So is paris any good or not”).
Lockwood’s first poetry collection, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black, was published by a small press in 2012. But it was only the following year, when one of those poems, “Rape Joke”, was republished by an online magazine, that it found a mass following. In it Lockwood recounts her rape as a 19-year-old by one of her father’s students and dissects the absurdity of rape culture more broadly. “The rape joke is that come on, you should have seen it coming. This rape joke is practically writing itself,” goes one line.
Lockwood’s second book of poetry, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, was published in 2014, this time by Penguin Press. It was another collection of bizarre and timely poems that proved Lockwood to be a singular mind. But it wasn’t until the publication of Priestdaddy in 2017 that she truly became a star.
With a large dose of hilarity, the memoir recounts the time she and her husband moved back in with her mother and almost unbelievably eccentric, gun-wielding father, who decided to become a Catholic priest after watching The Exorcist 72 times while working on a nuclear submarine.
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Next came a novel, 2021’s No One is Talking About This, the only book to be shortlisted for both that year’s Booker and Women’s Prizes, and the winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize. Its first part follows an unnamed woman who is incredibly online; in its second the woman finds out her niece will be born with a severe health condition, and comes crashing out of the online world as she must re-learn how to support her family through this crisis.
For Lockwood, who grew up in the American Midwest, didn’t go to university, and met her husband Jason in a poetry chatroom (they married when she was 21), the internet was a place you went to in order to understand who you were. So where does that leave her in 2025, in an online world far from the #MeToo movement, instead diseased with misinformation and the dominance of the far right? Needless to say, today Lockwood’s jokes are no longer a fixture of the Elon Musk-owned X, and poems don’t tend to go viral there anymore.
In March 2020, Lockwood travelled from her home in Savannah, Georgia, to deliver a lecture at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. While there she contracted Covid-19, and in the months afterwards suffered with its long-term effects, including fever, delusion and arthritis in her hands. This experience forms the crux of her second novel, the indisputably autobiographical Will There Ever Be Another You.
“‘What are you working on?’ people kept asking me,” says the narrator, unnamed apart from one moment when her mother refers to her as Tricia. “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.”
The problem is that this book is very far off a masterpiece – although confusion certainly plays a part. It is often entertaining, but it is also confounding, irritating, and – quite shockingly for Lockwood – occasionally even boring. One chapter about “reading Anna Karenina so hard I almost died” while on a mushroom trip renders itself pretty close to meaningless.
The book’s first and third parts are written in the third person, as the protagonist negotiates the effects of her illness, works with her co-writer on what is presumably a TV adaptation of No One is Talking About This, and deals with the sudden hospitalisation of her husband. Sandwiched between is a section in the first-person: the protagonist is now “I” rather than “she”, as the narrator negotiates the press and prize culture that comes with publishing an acclaimed novel.
The book is still in a chokehold with social media, though gladly there is also a little more going on. “For three weeks straight I have nightmares about being asked about cancel culture,” she writes in a section reflecting on doing the media rounds. “One woman who interviews me turns out to be a Terf [the acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminist], which I only realise when I get an email from her saying that she spent all morning online arguing about gender,” she notes a few pages later.
She travels to London to attend the Booker Prize ceremony, during which she amusingly guesses who has won before it is announced: “He will be the one who wins, at our distanced ceremony in the BBC theater, and I will know because a woman will come out with a powder puff beforehand and powder his tall shining forehead only.”
Patricia Lockwood during the photo call for authors shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize in London (Phot: Tolga Akmen/AFP)Lockwood describes all this without using names, so a little detective work is needed, which is fun if you’re a literary geek. Of course the Booker winner with the powdered forehead is Damon Galgut, and if you have your suspicions about who the gender-obsessed newspaper interviewer might be, an easy Google search confirms them. You come to understand that the only parts of this that might actually be fiction are the lines that hold no supposed concealing of the truth: “In the midst of it all, a request from Pamela Anderson to ghost-write her autobiography.”
But the major disappointment comes with the book’s lack of plot. There is no story arc here, nothing to be captivated by or caught up in. The book’s stop-start, bitty chapters don’t help. “Broken dialogue,” the protagonist’s friend tells her at one point, “is the way things were written now in order to be true.” But the result is more scrappy diary than compulsive tale – true or otherwise.
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Even the protagonist’s long Covid seems to be forgotten about by the book’s end, while the general strangeness of pandemic times just seeps into the pre-existing weirdness of her thoughts. There have been some fantastic pandemic novels published in recent years – notably Ali Smith’s Summer and Companion Piece, Deborah Levy’s August Blue and Sarah Moss’s The Fell. A novel that emotionally and intellectually interrogates the effects of chronic illness would have been a welcome addition to that pile. But Will There Ever Be Another You is not it.
Most of all, it is a shame that it isn’t really a novel. Novelists have always borrowed from their own lives, but the best works of autofiction don’t feel like thinly veiled memoir – they offer something more. At the sentence level, Lockwood is a wildly imaginative writer, yet her second novel suggests she is still only interested in writing about her own life.
Admittedly, it’s a more interesting life than most. But if readers of The Salt Path can be disappointed that a book they believed to be true has been accused of having so many made-up parts, where does that leave a book, sold as a novel, that turns out to be largely factual? There is no doubt that Lockwood is a linguistically inventive writer. I just wish she’d invent a story.
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