Will There Ever Be Another You is an autobiographical sequel: it follows the events of the Booker-shortlisted No One Is Talking About This (2021), a wry, fragmentary portrait of a brain rotted by Twitter. With this latest novel, Patricia Lockwood has shifted her focus from brain rot to brain fog: as the protagonist decides part-way through the book, “I was going to write a masterpiece about being confused.”
The book picks up a few weeks after the events of the previous novel. The protagonist has now left social media, but the family are still grieving the death of her sister’s daughter, “the Child”, who was born with the very rare Proteus syndrome (Lockwood’s own niece Lena died at six months after being the first person to be diagnosed with Proteus syndrome in utero).
During a short holiday in Scotland, the protagonist, Patricia, catches Covid. The effects of the virus leave her with an ongoing cognitive deficit, after which she feels “altered” and “replaced”. She shaves her head, wears an awful Looney Tunes shirt and experiments with various home remedies: “I had tried to rewire my brain with mushrooms, but succeeded in becoming temporarily psychic and reading Anna Karenina so hard I almost died.” She also keeps a “mad notebook” of misspelled observations, such as when “she had tried a sort of wrap dress and then looked down at the crosswalk and hee vaguna was out (that’s how she found it written down later, hee vaguna)”.
But Will There Ever Be Another You isn’t just a sequel and Lockwood hasn’t simply written the same novel again. The sensations mostly absent from the previous book are now present here, albeit after a fair amount of effort: “Write something sensual, she commanded herself, and after half an hour managed to produce the sentence: There were few compensations about the new life they were all leading, but daily headlines about coronavirus ‘lingering in the penis’ were one.” These details allow for more of the “actual tempo of experience” as well as the comic distortions familiar to any reader of Lockwood’s dysfunctional family memoir Priestdaddy (2017).
As she recovers from the brain fog, Patricia begins working with a friend to develop a TV adaptation of her “unfilmable” first novel. “It couldn’t be done,” she resolves: “There was a baby who needed to be born in it, who could not be depicted.” (The actress Anne Hathaway, here called “Shakespeare’s wife”, offers one solution: “It’s simple. We build an animatronic baby with a lamp for its head.”)
The protagonist’s cognitive recovery and her work on the TV show provide the broad “plot” of the novel, though beyond that there is little narrative shape. The impressions, sensations and reflections are instead patterned with artful repetitions: moments of near madness resolve repeatedly to images of food, absorption or ingestion. “The line of poetic logic,” the protagonist explains to a group of students towards the end of the novel, “is the narrative, where none appears to exist.”
Lockwood started out as a poet and the novel is littered with witty visual comparisons: a baby’s face is “like a Victorian representation of the moon”; the protagonist’s face is “like Nosferatu with Fly Girl bangs”. When the protagonist sleeps with her husband, it looks “like the beach at Normandy – her foot was over here, his hand over there”. These images are mostly funny, but occasionally Lockwood veers into the plainly wacky (an occupational hazard of the madness narrative). In a hospital, for instance, the protagonist pictures the face of Thérèse of Lisieux, “like an endless breadstick, and the habit wrapped around it like a dark brown napkin”.
It’s hard enough to tell the same joke twice, harder still to be original twice. But Will There Ever Be Another You has confirmed Lockwood’s place as a major contemporary writer: here is the poetic insight of Anne Carson, the intellectual curiosity of Ben Lerner, and the cloacal humour of Patricia Lockwood. Who else would make an aside about a great-great-uncle who “detonated the ass of an Italian with some sort of electrified paddle during an initiation rite”, or write about a character called “Anal Dave”? Finishing the book, you cannot help but ask: will there ever be another Patricia Lockwood?
Will There Ever Be Another You
Patricia Lockwood
Bloomsbury Circus, 256pp, £16.99
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[Further reading: The Booker Prize 2025 shortlist]
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This article appears in the 25 Sep 2025 issue of the New Statesman, “Are you up for it?” – Andy Burnham’s plan for Britain
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