Elliptical Selfhood

Patricia Lockwood goes behind the scenes of her recent novel ‘Will There Ever Be Another You’ and its explorations of long COVID, memory, and identity.

By Tess PollokMarch 9, 2026

• Fiction

WILL THERE EVER BE Another You, Patricia Lockwood’s new novel, is a lyrical portrait of life with long COVID, a colorful and intimate study of a mind struggling to formulate and reformulate itself in the face of imminent collapse. Early in the novel, the narrator—also named Patricia, and based on Lockwood herself—contracts COVID-19 on a family trip. In the four years that follow, she experiences constant migraines, debilitating brain fog, and cognitive and sensory distortions that challenge even the most foundational tenets of her selfhood. Though the book loosely follows the chronology of the author’s own life, whatever narrative events Lockwood is successfully able to communicate to the reader (her book tour, her husband’s surgery) are translated through a haze of sensory experiences that keenly evoke the disorientation and exhaustion of chronic mental illness. Absurd, jarring, and at times darkly funny, Will There Ever Be Another You is a diary of a mind in flux and a profound reflection on what it means to live in an increasingly chaotic world.

I sat down with Lockwood over Zoom in October 2025 to discuss how her lived experience with long COVID is represented in the book, what mental illness has to say about the self, and her long-standing interest in language and reality.

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TESS POLLOK: The narrator of Will There Ever Be Another You struggles with her memory, cognition, and focus after a bout of COVID-19; you’ve also been diagnosed with long COVID and have referred to the book as autobiographical. How closely did the novel hew to your own experience?

PATRICIA LOCKWOOD: Almost 100 percent. I got sick in March 2020 and started taking notes after that. Everything in the book is something I documented experiencing: auditory hallucinations, sensory disturbances, migraines, all of those happened to me. The fictionalized framework was just a fluid way for me to write about it all and examine a person trying to put her mind back together. I’m a fan of untrustworthy narratives; I like shifting colors, shapes, and impressions, things that slide around.

Mental illness, especially chronic mental illness, blurs the boundaries between the mind and the body. A realistic element of the book that I appreciated was that it was difficult, even for the narrator, to relate whether what was happening in her mind was making her sick or if it was her physical sickness that was affecting her mind.

Exactly. A lot of people have asked me about my use of language in this book, like why did I try to make the reader insane along with me? [Chronic mental illness] is a clinical depletion of the self. If you are experiencing migraines or migraine auras on and off for several years, it’s almost like being totally unstuck from time. I wanted the book to act as a mirror of that experience for people. There are going to be some readers who went through something similar and can immediately relate, and some who did not but can enter that experience through the language. There are also going to be people who can’t understand the book or why I wrote it; that was something that I understood when I began writing. When you’re writing about mental illness, there’s always a lot of fear around being misunderstood or not being believed.

Your last book, No One Is Talking About This, deals with a narrator who is chronically online. Her sense of self is totally distorted and disrupted by the internet, not unlike how the narrator of Will There Ever Be Another You feels herself disrupted by chronic mental illness. Do you see the internet and digital life as exacerbating mental illness, or otherwise interfering with our ability to perceive reality?

Yes. Even just talking about it now, I can feel the feeling of sliding down the rabbit hole of online life. What I described about that experience and what other people seemed to recognize in it was the feeling of being on a precipice. Ironically, getting long COVID kind of pushed me away from that—I wasn’t able to be on my phone or use the internet in a normal way for a very long time. If I scrolled down a timeline, I would get dizzy, or it would trigger a migraine aura.

That sounds completely terrifying. Mental illness and long COVID can undermine the narrative cohesion of your life and make it impossible to think straight or manage daily tasks.

I think my brain really did try, is the thing. It tried to help me with refrains, which I included in the book. It would be a line of dialogue or a line from a song that was just ringing out in my head over and over. I think that was my brain trying to encode memory and put a narrative together, trying to make sense of things and just being unable to do so. With mental illness, you can’t narrativize. You have no sense of the chronicle of your own life. So your brain just goes, Well, I have these small pieces, and I can keep repeating them to you.

It felt like time was not progressing for any of us during the pandemic, sick or well. Time wasn’t moving forward because we weren’t with other people or making new memories. We were all at home, just in our own minds. We were dreaming of the deep past, remembering kindergarten classmates, things like that. The book starts to move faster at the point where lockdown stops and the narrator goes on a book tour. As she talks to new people, her time and reality start to open up.

The book is very interior; it’s essentially a document of her inner life with this illness. What attracts you to that style of writing?

It’s the way I think and it’s the way I’ve always written. Even when I write essays and critical pieces, I always go back in and add an inaugural paragraph that provides context for what the book is about; that’s not something I naturally think to do. I tend to think and write from very, very deeply inside myself.

What makes selfhood such a fascinating topic to you?

I’ve always felt very permeable. I wrote a line in the chapter “Doppelgänger” where the narrator describes how, when she watches basketball, she wants to go into the bodies of the people playing. I’ve always felt that way. Anytime I watch a body, I want to know if I could be inside it. In certain situations, it almost feels like someone is flowing into me or I’m flowing into them. Again, I’ve just always been like that, but it got much more pronounced when I became ill. Anyone I looked at, even my cat, would cause me to lose all the boundaries of myself and I’d feel total porousness with the whole world. I had it even without people. I sometimes felt like I was going to enter the weather around me. It can be very scary to walk around the world with no protection like that; there’s this fear that anyone and everyone is coming for you. There’s another scene that relates to this in the book, when the narrator is watching Meryl Streep on TV and she feels afraid of her. She feels threatened by her acting and feels like her sense of self is so fragile that even just seeing it could totally subsume her.

Do you see any parallels between the inner experience of mental illness and the world at large?

We’ll know more about that in the future, I think. One of the books that I was thinking about while writing the book was Down Below by Leonora Carrington, which was about her mental disintegration and institutionalization when the Nazis were invading. To some extent, I read it and found myself thinking that hers was a reasonable reaction. I think some people are a little bit more in the wind of the world that way.

The book is also interested in investigating memory. The narrator struggles with her memory but also claims that she wishes she had no memories at all. Why write about memory in this way?

Objectively, I remember a great deal of what was happening to me when I first developed long COVID—maybe even more so than most people. But the type of memories I had of the experience were not the typical working memories I had of the rest of my life. What I started doing was externalizing everything and writing everything down. I have seven gigantic notebooks of exactly what you read in Will There Ever Be Another You, talking about all the different things that were happening to me at different times. But those were mostly internal experiences. I guess I took the amazing memory I had of my life before for granted.

One of the things that will happen when you’re having a bad migraine is that you won’t remember it happening. It dilates time. You’ll lose days and some things will feel very clear, like they’re under a spotlight, and other things will just be totally wiped away. I think my memory was affected by the fact that I was totally on and off like that. I wanted to convey how unsettling it was by contrasting these crisply drawn scenes with this sense of memories sliding away.

How do the narrator’s struggles with memory affect her reality?

I think of the book as documenting a kind of interception. It’s showing that there’s a lens brought down between her and the world. Then the question becomes: What is the nature of reality in the first place? Isn’t it always a lens? I’m definitely playing with those kinds of ideas, like in the sixties when people were actually just putting different pairs of colored glasses on to see the world really differently. The book is more interested in asking what happens if the lens within yourself somehow changes, and what that means for the long-term identity and stability of the self.

I think of language as being a major interlocutor in that process. How does the book comment on language?

My experiences with language while I was sick were insane. I’d wake up one day and be absolutely eloquent and sound like myself, and then I’d be on a Zoom call and suddenly I couldn’t remember my own name. I didn’t even know for a long time which self I was going to wake up as. Sometimes I’d experience these euphoric states accompanying my migraine aura where I’d become hyperarticulate—that would worry me, just as much as not being able to speak or remember. There’s that great Virginia Woolf quote about how feeling dangerously well is almost always a warning sign. I just felt like I was completely at the mercy of the weather of the world.

It became really bad for me, especially when I had to go on my book tour while sick, answering the same questions over and over about my artistic viewpoint and that kind of thing. It was dangerous to have such a loose grasp on my own language at that time because I was constantly wondering, What if I say something that isn’t true? Or, what if I make a joke about being the Aaron Neville of literature that doesn’t land? Everything felt slippery and totally wild. There was some hopefulness to it too because there was always the chance I would wake up feeling totally like myself. I just never knew.

The book is very lyrical, very experimental. You’ve written a lot of poetry, but I’m wondering what it was like to use that same language in a work like this, with the length and formatting of a novel?

People are always asking me, “Isn’t this just poetry?” The answer is yeah, that’s what I’ve always been doing. Since I started as a poet, I have incredible freedom with language, and I get generosity from my readers to do certain things with my language and trust that they are willing to follow me there. That’s not a position that every writer gets to be in. Even when I’m writing essays or criticism, I always want to use fragments or employ language in a poetic way. A lot of my editors have had to hold me back from that.

Did you struggle with chronic mental illness before contracting long COVID?

Yes, there was a predisposition there. I was always kind of odd. Bipolar runs on my dad’s side, and there’s some strange and ambiguous stuff on my mom’s side as well. My maternal grandmother, Mary Flam, went completely insane well into her forties. She was talking to herself all the time and family members were having to follow her around at a distance. But there came a time when that wasn’t true anymore, and no one in my family knows exactly why this happened. An incredibly mysterious statement from my mother: she had to make a decision about whether or not she chose to be in the world, and she chose to stay.

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Patricia Lockwood is the best-selling author of the Booker Prize finalist and Dylan Thomas Prize–winning novel No One Is Talking About This, named one of the “10 Best Books of 2021” by The New York Times Book Review and one of The Atlantic’s “Great American Novels” of the past 100 years. Her other books include the memoir Priestdaddy, named one of the “10 Best Books of 2017” by The New York Times Book Review, as well as two poetry collections. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and the London Review of Books, where she is a contributing editor.