“A warm afternoon in winter, and Shakespeare’s wife was asking to see me. She wanted to buy my brain, but how to explain that is was no longer worth anything?”
Y’all may recall the 2021 Booker season and my dark horse favorite, Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking About This. Her follow-up was published this year, and I put Will There Ever Be Another You (Riverhead 2025) on my Booker predictions. (They do like repeaters.) It wasn’t nominated, but that didn’t stop me from getting my library request in, especially after I saw that fantastic cover. I’m glad I did, but let’s go ahead and get the cat out of the bag – this one didn’t wow me quite the same way.
Will There Ever Be Another You is Lockwood’s fictional account of her dealing with long Covid. The events take place after the publication of No One is Talking About This, but there is a section dealing with the press tour and interviews she was required to participate in due to the nomination for Booker award. “You can’t win if you don’t go,” her husband tells her. (I was unaware of the “in-person” requirements until @gygoldenreviewer advised me of them in a discussion about Pynchon. As an aside, gygoldenreviewer’s daughter makes an appearance in this novel – she is the 15 year old Mollie who posed the question to the panel.)
Much like No One is Talking About This, this novel is for the chronically online and the sections often read like viral TikToks on loop, soundbytes included. (I didn’t expect to see That “One Mailman” but there he and his lil’ stank was!) There’s politics and pandemics and unnamed presidents that cause paranoia to even think about. But I couldn’t follow all the breadcrumbs this time, and many of the internet references went over my head as did some of the literary and fine arts. (I’ve never read Anna Karenina – shhh don’t tell anyone.)
One aspect I really appreciated was when she talked about her mind and how she was losing words (and her identity). She’s talking about saying the wrong word, the one she wants just on the edge of brain. In the section where she explains this symptom, she sums up the problems with “A corundum, she thought, that might never be solved.” She, of course, means conundrum, and this glitch in the mind is the best way to show not tell what she means when talks about this symptom.
The novel reads like a fever dream, even before the ‘shrooms, but it doesn’t seem as organic as No One is Talking About This – the form seems a bit more forced into madness here and some of the magic is lost, but if that epilogue says anything, it’s that Lockwood had to cling to her writing, using the disaster as her temporary reef.
While I think it swings and misses some, I don’t think anyone writes quite like Lockwood.
A Girl Named Tommi 