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“My mind had moved a few inches to the left of its usual place,” the author and poet Patricia Lockwood wrote in an essay first published in July 2020 in the London Review of Books. At the time, she was describing the process of contracting COVID during the early weeks of lockdown, during which she felt, in no uncertain terms, “like I had been replaced,” she says now. “I didn’t belong to myself. I just was in a different world.”
For some authors, such a statement might be interpreted metaphor. For Lockwood, it was her lived experience. “I developed what I realized later were actual paranoid delusions,” Lockwood wrote in the LRB essay, later telling The New Yorker, “My first manifestations were neurological. I didn’t develop a cough until much later. It was like the fictional pathways in my brain were set on fire, and I was experiencing movies, television, books, all of that as real.” The sickness not only stripped her of her physical faculties; it disconnected her altogether from reality. “Basically, I got the coronavirus and went insane,” Lockwood tells me, in the droll tone of an average Internet denizen describing a dark but compelling meme.
Less than a year after the London Review of Books essay, Lockwood published her debut novel: the much-lauded No One is Talking About This, a 2021 Booker Prize finalist later named one of 136 “Great American Novels” in a much-discussed Atlantic article last year—in part thanks to the book’s prominence amongst and insight into the Extremely Online. (As The Atlantic wrote, the novel follows a female protagonist “made online-famous by a single tweet,” who “generally enacts the viral version of Being a Great Writer” until “something happens—something real, something offline.”) But it wasn’t until much more recently that Lockwood felt capable of sharing the synthesis from her COVID-induced trip through, as she describes it, “Wonderland.”
ELLE can exclusively share that, on Sept. 23, 2025, Lockwood’s map of Wonderland will finally land in readers’ hands. Her sophomore novel, Will There Ever Be Another You, introduces a woman who, in the wake of loss, has similarly lost her tethers to reality while disease overtakes her brain and her world. Lockwood’s publisher, Riverhead Books, officially describes this character as “afraid of her own floorboards” while “‘WHAT IS LOVE? BABY DON’T HURT ME’ plays over and over in her ears.” The book itself is “the brain-shredding, phosphorescent story of one woman’s dissolution and her attempt to create a new way of thinking, as well as a profound investigation into what keeps us alive in times of unprecedented disorientation and loss.”
Ahead, Lockwood offers a brief preview of what fans can expect from her most mind-bending story yet.
You’re a poet, a novelist, and a memoirist. Tell me, then, about the decision to document your surreal COVID experience through the specific lens of fiction.
I felt that [when I was experiencing it] I was approaching it fictionally, because it didn’t feel like it was happening to me. So I had this distance.
I decided I wouldn’t put any sort of sensation or feeling or cognitive disturbance or physical experience in the book that wasn’t true [of my own experience]. So I kept all of that extremely accurate to what happened. But I had the freedom, since it was fictional, to approach it through different kinds of writing. One thing I definitely wanted to do was to show not only [the illness and associated mental state], but then the process of rebuilding yourself, rebuilding your ability to read, to write. I wanted to include a lot of different kinds of writing to show that you had to rebuild that on a number of levels.
I understood that I was learning to write again, and I would have to write in a different way, and I needed to adopt a new style to convey certain aspects of it: the repetitions you would hear in your head; encounters with doctors where you’d have to be like, “Well, one of my symptoms is that I see gorillas in the trees. Is there anything you can do for me about that?”
So how did you actually go about writing the book?
I was almost always operating in a state of aura. I would wake up, I would have my coffee, and then I would wait for this feeling that I thought of as being lifted into the air. It wasn’t exactly the way I wrote before. Basically, I would go flying up, and then I felt myself have this kind of aerial view, and I would slowly, slowly grind out these weird sentences, put them together, then read them over and over.
There was less of a sense of fluidity, less of a sense of operating in a continuous timeline [than in previous writings]. It was more like I, myself, was in a still pool of water and the pool of water around me was the world.
It’s fascinating that you were able to be in this physical and cognitive state, yet still aware enough to consider, “Oh, what’s happening to my mind and my body is of interest. I should write this down.”
Even in the most cognitively lowered state that I was in, there was something that was still there that was myself. There was this figure that persisted. You can stand in the corner of the room of your own body and watch. That’s how it felt.
I’m curious how you see this book fitting into the larger canon of the so-called madwoman.
I’ve always loved insanity narratives. As a kid, I was like, “Well, that place honestly sounds kind of nice.” And all your friends are there!
You’re like, “Sign me up, actually.”
I was really into those books. I mean, I obviously loved The Bell Jar. Summer of 2020, I did read Leonora Carrington’s Down Below. It is so starkly matter-of-fact in its language, and it doesn’t make concessions to the reader, like, “I need to explain this to you.” So that was really instrumental in showing me how to [do the same].
I’ve also read illness narratives, which are a little bit different [from insanity narratives]. A lot of times, in an illness narrative, the speaker, her primary job almost seems to be that she has to convince the audience that she is sane and that she experienced these things and wasn’t imagining them. And I was like, I’m not going to do that at all. I’m allowing the reader to go along with this and be like, “She’s off her nut. She’s lost her mind. She’s in Wonderland.” I was like, “There’s no part of [this narrative] that’s going to insist on being recognized, because I am trying to be in it. And you’re going to be in it with me. And when you’re in it, you don’t know what the hell’s going on.”
What is the most difficult thing for you, personally, about writing and being a writer?
It’s, honestly, trying to get the story the way I want it. It’s like you’re trying to bring something into balance inside yourself. I’ve described it before as similar to when you get on those freaky scales at the doctors’ office and they [move the counterweights] until, suddenly, it’s your weight. I was always fascinated with that little movement. When I’m writing, it really feels like I’m doing some sort of similar micro-adjustment inside myself to bring the thing that I want to create into balance.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.