On Patricia Lockwood's "Will There Ever Be Another You?"

David Ruiz

31 Oct 2025 — 1 min read

Reading anything after "Gravity's Rainbow" was always going to be a tussle—what can compare with receiving The Gift of Sight?—but Patricia Lockwood's semi-autobiographical account of battling Long COVID was an especially poor contestant to bet on.

This book sucks piss right out of dicks. It's strange in a bad way, it's bad in a nonsensical way, and close to nobody except the most internet-obsessed would ever want it.

Very quickly are we treated to The Point, which is that Long COVID is a debilitating, mind-shredding disease that removes language, structure, and, relatedly, identity from a writer's sense of self. It's an important and frightening observation, which is cutely summed up when Lockwood writes that she has "Brian Fog."

It's far less cute when Lockwood insists on walking us through her mismatches in vocabulary or when she does the exact same misspelling trick just 30 pages later, as she ponders a "corundum" (are you fucking kidding me fire your editor and get someone who pushes back dear lord).

It's a shame because Lockwood's prior work, "No One Is Talking About This" is beautiful and so clear-eyed. Alas!

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On Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose"

On Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein"

On Ben Shattuck's "The History of Sound"

On Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Left Hand of Darkness"