How Patricia Lockwood Wrote “Will There Ever Be Another You”

On a moist night in Might, Patricia Lockwood, who writes with the impish verve and provocative guilelessness of a peeing cupid, was scanning the menu at a Mexican restaurant close to her residence, in Savannah, Georgia. Her husband, Jason Kendall, an agricultural-commodities researcher whom Lockwood calls Corn Man, sat subsequent to her. Each discover eating to be a fragile enterprise. Lockwood bought COVID in March of 2020 and continues to expertise aftereffects from the virus; she has adopted a ketogenic food plan—excessive in fats, low in carbs—to assist handle her signs. Kendall has had a fragile abdomen ever since he suffered a set of catastrophic hemorrhages three years in the past and practically died.The Tradition Trade: A Centenary IssueSubscribers get full entry. Learn the difficulty »When a waitress stopped by, Kendall ordered cauliflower tacos with no sauce; Lockwood requested for fish ones with out tortillas. “It’s very embarrassing, as a result of it grew to become a podcast food plan,” she stated of her keto routine, in a tone that recommended that embarrassment, for her, is extra of a theoretical than a felt phenomenon. Lockwood, who’s forty-three, has close-cropped hair, expressive arms, and the rapid-fire, matter-of-fact confidence of somebody who speaks even quicker than she thinks. The playwright Heidi Schreck, who helped to adapt Lockwood’s life story for tv, informed me, “The very first thing that at all times involves thoughts, once I consider Tricia, is that self-portrait of Hildegard von Bingen”—the twelfth-century German abbess and mystic, who, in a e book dedicated to her divine revelations, depicted herself with a writing pill on her lap and flames capturing out of her behavior. Lockwood’s lack of inhibition can result in bother. At a panel in New York hosted by the Girls’s Prize earlier within the spring, she all of the sudden slid off her stool mid-gesticulation. She not permits herself to do karaoke.Lockwood started her writing life quietly, as a poet. She discovered her first main viewers on Twitter, posting self-proclaimed “absurdities”—comparable to a collection of Dadaistic sexts that made florid metaphorical use of rock slides, dewdrops, and plot holes within the novels of Dan Brown—that rapidly got here to outline the medium’s zany, waggish ethos. When she returned to the web page, it was with a memoir, “Priestdaddy” (2017), which chronicled her unbelievable childhood because the daughter of a guitar-shredding, action-movie-obsessed Midwestern Catholic priest. Lockwood has since added fiction and criticism to her literary arsenal. Throughout genres, her calling card is her unmistakable voice, which sasses and seduces with fast wit and cheerful perversity, urgent the reader near her comedian, confiding “I.” “On account of sure quirks in my upbringing, I really like males simply, which is both Christly or some slut factor” is basic Lockwood. So is the truth that this confession seems not in a private essay however in a overview of the works of John Updike.When she bought sick, her first intuition was to make a joke. “My story will probably be that John Harvard gave it to me” is how she began an essay printed within the London Assessment of Books in July, 2020. The very last thing she had finished, earlier than the pandemic hit, was give a lecture at Harvard in regards to the nature of life on-line; on the aircraft again residence, a person had coughed and coughed. A number of days later, she was flattened with a fever. Even after her temperature dropped, issues stayed fallacious. Her arms would burn or go numb; her pores and skin glittered with ache. She seen that her physique had change into attuned to Savannah’s climate, as if its strain programs affected some mysterious one inside. A prickling on the base of her neck, a twinge in her thumb: right here comes the storm.The worst downside, although, was together with her thoughts. Within the L.R.B. essay—“Insane After Coronavirus?” is the title—Lockwood described “stumbling in my speech, transposing syllables, selecting the fallacious nouns fully.” Her reminiscence had crumbled; she may barely learn. Nonetheless, she thought that she noticed a faint glimmering past the fog. “I do know I used to have the ability to do that, I will do it once more,” she wrote. That oasis turned out to be a mirage—the start, not the top, of her ordeal. “That was the final time I felt that I seemed like myself,” Lockwood stated, at dinner.For a author like Lockwood, the voice on the web page is the entire recreation; the prospect of shedding it’s terrifying, the equal of a pianist’s crippling arthritis. However it was additionally uncannily acquainted. When she fell unwell, Lockwood had simply completed writing her first novel, “No One Is Speaking About This” (2021). Its unnamed, alter-ego protagonist has discovered renown for her playful posts on a Twitter-esque platform. However the extra she lends her sensibility to the web, the extra she fears that her non-public stream of consciousness has been swept away within the surge of the collective’s, which has barnacled her language with its personal diction, its personal clichés. Possessed by the hive thoughts, she is more and more haunted by “the unshakeable conviction that another person was writing the within of her head.”The remedy for a life lived an excessive amount of on-line is to unplug, tough as that may be. However what to do about an sickness that nobody totally understands, least of all of the sufferer? Lockwood now is aware of that a lot of what plagued her was a state of perpetual migraine. She sometimes skilled not complications however excessive sensory disturbances—a imaginative and prescient of a gorilla in a tree, say—and one thing that she referred to as “the refrains,” the fixed psychological repetition of a line of dialogue, a sentence, a phrase from a tune. She would jot these down in her “mad pocket book,” a blue-covered Moleskine, together with fragments of concepts that she was having, observations from the studying she was struggling to do, and varied medical regimens she was making an attempt: gabapentin, rescue triptans, the migraine drugs Ajovy and Qulipta. On the restaurant, she recalled that the very first thing to actually assist was a tea steeped with psilocybin mushrooms that had been mailed to her by the author Jami Attenberg. “A tiny dose,” she insisted.“You’ll be out within the swimming pool, generally for hours within the afternoon,” Kendall remembered. He’s forty-four, bald and athletic, with the calm, succesful demeanor of Mr. Clear’s laid-back little brother. When Lockwood was at her sickest, she grew to become satisfied that the floorboards of their condo have been going to break down below her toes. Kendall took motion, shifting them out of the town and to a home on close by Wilmington Island, the place she may float freely. “I assumed we may therapeutically reorient your physique,” he stated.“I significantly like how its summary qualities make something I say about it sound believable.”Cartoon by Robert Leighton“I may hearken to music once more,” Lockwood recalled. Within the pool, she performed “Hosianna Mantra,” by the pioneering German digital band Popol Vuh, on repeat. The album, from 1972, has been described as a “meditation on religion and uncertainty”—a sort of prayer. “Perhaps that’s why the writing got here again.”As soon as Lockwood was effectively sufficient, she started to form the fragments from this shattered interval of her life right into a novel, “Will There Ever Be One other You,” which Riverhead will publish in September. “I wrote it insane,” she informed me, “and edited it sane”; it’s a collaboration between two totally different folks, each of whom occur to be her. Sickness is repeatedly figured as a sort of impostor or thief—not merely as an expertise undergone by the self however, Lockwood writes, “the factor that the self had been changed by.” Getting sick, she stated, thrust the questions that lurk on the coronary heart of all novels, and all lives, to the middle of hers: “What’s the efficiency of a self? What’s an individual? What am I?”Like different writers to whom the label of autofiction has been utilized, Lockwood finds it fruitful to attract on her personal expertise in her work. But, when she writes in a strictly factual mode, she is usually accused of fabrication. In 2016, The New Republic despatched Lockwood to a Trump rally in New Hampshire, the place she described seeing {a photograph} on the jumbotron of Melania in a bikini embracing an inflatable Shamu. Writing for the L.R.B. about Karl Ove Knausgaard—she is a contributing editor at that publication, introduced on to not edit different folks’s essays however, she informed me, “as an outsider artist” to put in writing freewheeling, minimally edited essays of her personal—she recounted a visit that she had made to a literary pageant in Norway, solely to find that Knausgaard had cancelled his look and been changed by an Elvis impersonator. Each particulars have been singled out by critics as too outrageously bizarre, too clearly Lockwood-like, to be unembellished. This makes her indignant. “I nearly by no means make up something,” she informed me. “I simply discover various things.”So, in her firm, did I. There’s a sort of Lockwood lens that brings into focus the unbelievable and hilariously weird options lurking within the midst of strange life, which a distinct author may favor to easy over for realism’s sake. One morning in Savannah, I went with Lockwood and Kendall to Fancy Parker’s, an upscale gas-station grocery retailer, to get snacks. After breaking off to look at the chips choice, I discovered the 2 of them within the home-goods nook, the place an worker with the bulging biceps and voluminous pompadour of Johnny Bravo was wrangling a large statue of the Virgin Mary onto a shelf subsequent to some scented candles. Lockwood chatted with him amiably. “We get the Catholic catalogues in my residence, and they are often fairly expensive,” she stated, as in the event that they have been discussing the price of eggs and never a life-size sculpture of the mom of God.In Lockwood’s world, the apparition of a saint will not be strictly unusual. She is the second of 5 kids born to Greg and Karen Lockwood, high-school sweethearts from Cincinnati, Ohio. Karen got here from a giant Catholic household; Greg was an atheist and, like many atheists, pleased with it. After they married, at eighteen, he enlisted within the Navy, serving on a nuclear submarine. It was tons of of toes below the ocean, following marathon viewings of “The Exorcist,” that he met God and located his religion.Quickly afterward, Lockwood was born, in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Her father started his profession as a Lutheran minister, however transformed to Catholicism when she was six. On the Vatican, his case was reviewed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later to be Pope Benedict XVI, who gave him permission, as Lockwood writes, to maintain his spouse and even his kids, “irrespective of how unhealthy they may be.” Greg Lockwood turned out to be no strange man of the fabric. As depicted in “Priestdaddy,” his titanic charisma was matched solely by his gale-force whims. Karen, the household’s indefatigable heart, saved the family working as Greg moved them from rectory to rectory in what Lockwood has referred to as “all of the worst cities of the midwest.”