There is a thing Patricia Lockwood does whenever she spots a priest while walking through an airport. The 43-year-old grew up as one of five children of a Catholic priest in the American midwest, an eccentric upbringing documented, famously, in Priestdaddy, her hit memoir of 2017, and a wellspring of comic material that just keeps giving. Priests in the wild amuse and comfort her, a reminder of home and the superiority that comes with niche expertise. “I was recently at St Louis airport and saw a priest,” she says, “high church, not Catholic, because of the width of the collar; that’s the thing they never get right in TV shows. And I gave him a look that was a little bit too intimate. A little bit like: I know.” Sometimes, as she’s passing, she’ll whisper, “encyclical”.
This is Lockwood: elfin, fast-talking, determinedly idiosyncratic, with the uniform irony of a writer who came up through social media and for whom life online is a primary subject. If Priestdaddy documented her unconventional upbringing in more or less conventional comic style, her novels and poems since then have worked in more fragmentary modes that mimic the disjointed experience of processing information in bite-size non sequiturs. In 2021, Lockwood published her first novel, No One Is Talking About This, in which she wrote of the disorienting grief at the death of her infant niece from a rare genetic disorder. In her new novel, Will There Ever Be Another You, she returns to the theme, eliding that grief with her descent into a Covid-induced mania, a terrifying experience leavened with very good jokes. A danger of Lockwood’s writing is that it traps her in a persona that makes sincerity – any statement not hedged and flattened by sarcasm – almost impossible. But Lockwood, it seems to me, has a bouncy energy closer to an Elizabeth Gilbert than a Lauren Oyler or an Ottessa Moshfegh, say, so that no matter how glib her one-liners, you tend to come away from reading her with a general feeling of warmth.
So it is in person, too. Lockwood is speaking with me from her home in Savannah, Georgia, where she lives with her husband, Jason. In 2019, the pair took a vacation to Scotland, accompanied by her mother, providing Lockwood with the opening tour de force of the new novel. Entitled Fairy Pools, this section is a fictionalised travelogue in which the family bicker in the car and enjoy misunderstandings with the Scots, in the form of her mother’s persistent and doomed efforts to order iced tea. There is a long, satisfying run of jokes about how Irn-Bru strikes the American palate (“a pink electrocution of the tongue”). The Lockwood character gets food poisoning. (“Arugula, she thought. I’m going to die alone in a Scottish castle because people have gotten too good for iceberg lettuce.”) They take photos. (“Upon her arrival, instead of taking pictures of the North Sea, she had taken pictures of elk bellowing on the walls and a little guy who appeared to be penetrating his bagpipes.”) And there is a touching vignette based on Lockwood’s sister losing her phone, containing thousands of photos of her late niece, Lena. “You know that the images are backed up,” says Lockwood, now. “But it’s not the original phone. People have these very warm, entangled relationships with these devices as storing memories.”
All of which is precursor to the main event of the novel, a section entitled The Changeling in which the Lockwood character gets Covid very early on in the pandemic and descends into a state that strikes her as akin to madness, a wordless fog in which intense, random thoughts take on outsized meaning. For example: “It’s like Joyce Carol Oates is trying to start a feud with me … does everyone have this feeling?” Or: “I was glad God had killed Gene Kelly.” It was this experience, says Lockwood, that sparked the novel, which grew out of The Changeling’s first lines: “It stole people from themselves. You might look the same to others but you have been replaced.”
The challenge for any writer looking back on 2020 at this relatively short distance is that nobody much wants to revisit it. Lockwood was acutely conscious of this and while there are some people in masks in the book, she strenuously avoids use of the words “Covid” and “lockdown”. She hopes that her period of derangement works both as a literal account of a widely experienced phenomenon, and more generally as the book’s guiding metaphor, a stand-in for any life event that causes one to lose contact with reality. And in fact, in early readings, she says, “what seems to be true of audiences is that they recognised all of what I was talking about – even if they hadn’t been ill. I also found it interesting that people were so ready to talk about it when it was something that was like: Hey, ‘Close the curtains, do not write about this, we do not need to think about this again,’ which is what happened with the original flu pandemic [in 1918].”
I have to confess to Lockwood that words like “changeling” and “fairies” in this context make me extremely nervous. “Do tell!”, she says, gamely. It’s the suggestion of whimsy that sets me off, all the way up to Hilary Mantel’s ghost on the stairs or Muriel Spark’s insistence on believing in angels. Like, sure, OK. But really? Lockwood laughs. “I think you would probably believe in angels too if you could write the way Muriel Spark did” – a fair point. But the difficulty for any writer going the changeling-and-fairy route is to stop the story floating away into figurative affectation, even as she tries to evoke literal feelings of unreality.
The fact is, says Lockwood, that her sense of being dislocated from herself during Covid was very real. “There are visual, optic aura-type phenomena that I would experience early on, where you would see strange after-images, or a beating in the corner of your eye – things like that. I think people who have those things learn to live with them and make companions out of them and give them names. But this governing phenomenon has no name to [the character]. She doesn’t know what it is. So she’s only experiencing the sensations, the patterns, the colours, the visions. And the true thing, when it feels like madness, is that there’s no name for it.”
As I was reading, those passages reminded me of a line of Alice Munro’s in which, wrote Munro, everything became “a spiteful imitation of itself”. “Yes,” says Lockwood, “that’s very resonant. Did someone come into my house in the middle of the night and replace everything with a slightly less genuine version? It felt like my eyesight changed, like I was seeing things in less dimensionality, which leads to suspicion. These secret nursed hatreds: like, if I’m not I, are you, you? What is a person?”
These inquiries of Lockwood’s are presented in a high comic style that saves them from too much abstraction. “For three weeks straight,” she writes, “I have nightmares about being asked about cancel culture. It is my greatest fear, to be asked about cancel culture – or that I will be so terrorized by the possibility that I will immediately begin talking about it anyway, and in doing so present the opportunity to be murdered by public opinion myself.”
This riff falls in a section in which the protagonist goes on a virtual book tour and endures a photoshoot, all the while freaking out not just about Covid but about exposure. “What she’s experiencing is success, actually, but she’s terrified,” says Lockwood. “Is this what success is? It feels more dysphoric than anything you’ve experienced. In any publicity experience you felt very exposed, but more so because of the extreme cloistered-ness of what everyone was experiencing. Everyone pouring their eyes and their faces into these screens.” One can take this point while also vaguely wishing that novelists might heed the following warning: if you’re tempted to write about going on a book tour, it might be time to venture out beyond publishing to refill the tank.
Anyway, Lockwood is obviously writing about herself and the disorienting experience both of the success of Priestdaddy, which won the 2018 Thurber Prize for American Humor, and the viral success of her earlier writing; namely, the poem Rape Joke, published by the Awl in 2013, that launched her career, and her subsequent years at the coalface on Twitter, making very good jokes and sharing her comic poetry. (Her most famous sext-parody: “I am a Dan Brown novel and you do me in my plot-hole.”) She’s off Twitter, now, like everyone else. “For a while I did Bluesky, which I liked a lot, and a lot of the original people from Twitter went there.” But as the platform grew, she says, “it had a problem with disagreement bots; you would post something, it would get traction and waves of not-people would be like, ‘I take issue with this!’ That made things less fun.” When Trump was re-elected, she decided she wasn’t going to spend the next four years immersed in online discourse about it and bailed.
In some ways, says Lockwood, it was her first novel, No One Is Talking About This, shortlisted for the Booker prize in 2021, that proved more exposing than the memoir, because she wrote about her niece, Lena. Lockwood holds up her phone to show me a photo of a baby girl with a shock of brown hair, encumbered by medical equipment. Lena, who was born with Proteus syndrome, died in 2019 at the age of six months. In the years since, Lockwood has written very evocatively about grief. “I saw it secondhand with my sister, and then experienced it myself – that it doesn’t get better. It doesn’t heal. You think, OK, a year has passed, and now progress is going to happen. There won’t be stops and starts, you won’t fall back. You’ll continue to have dreams of this person. And you don’t. There’s this thing that everyone else in the world expects you to move on; like, hurry up already. And that’s not how it happens.”
In the case of the death of a baby, she says, there’s even less patience for the grieving parent in some ways; a sense that “she lived for six months and a day, and that’s such a short time upon this Earth there’s a commensurate idea that after six months have passed maybe [things get better].” But that’s not how it goes. Six years after Lena’s death and all that has happened is that “in the mother’s mind, now she’s six years old”.
Lockwood’s broader writing about her family has given us one of the great, dysfunctional households in literature, up there with David Sedaris’s rackety crowd. Her father, Greg, a former submariner turned Lutheran minister, converted to Catholicism and had a dispensation from the Vatican to be a priest with a wife and children. The five Lockwood kids grew up in rectory accommodation in Cincinnati, Ohio and St Louis, Missouri with a father who liked guns, electric guitars and Rush Limbaugh, as well as God. While her father is inadvertently hilarious but has “never knowingly said anything funny in his life”, her mother, Karen, says Lockwood, “really really knows the joke is funny. She’s a big wordplay person, which I did not inherit! I actually have almost a pun deafness. Someone will present me with a pun and I’ll just stare at them. You tune out your mother as a teenager – ‘Oh, God, mom’ – and it ended with me being completely unable to produce a good pun of any kind.”
Surprisingly, Lockwood says she is the most conventional of the siblings. Despite describing herself as the sort of “impulsive person who will steal a police horse in the night”, in the context of the family, “everyone would say I’m the most normal. Writing [everything] down is kind of a normie thing to do. In an age in which we have suffered the desaturation of the personality, where we all sound a little bit more the same and colours are more muted, we’ve got some freaks over here among the Lockwood children.”
This is particularly true of her father, a Trump supporter whom Lockwood has tried to view generously as the victim of Maga’s mass manipulations. In a London Review of Books diary recently she wrote about visiting her parents, “and seeing a Trump flag hanging in the alcove of the rectory, which is not a thing you’re allowed to do in the rectory!” she exclaims. But, she says, “I also had to look at this as something that has happened to a lot of people his age. I’ve seen so many people disappear down rabbit holes of every variety, believe incredibly strange things, that I think we do have to keep our eyes on the ball and look at the propaganda machine – look at the people who are doing this. Who benefits, right? From us being driven from the bosoms of our families because of these nursed hatreds that don’t even make immediate sense?” She says, “I didn’t want it to be true of anyone except this extremely eccentric, idiosyncratic man, right? But what happens when it’s a wave and the wave is overtaking the entire world?”
The only recourse for the writer is to expose the fundamental absurdity of these people, a role Lockwood is happy to assume. “I think of the clown as the sacrificial role, the one who’s willing to be a fool and to state the thing that everyone else in the room agrees goes unstated. You take that a little bit on yourself so that other people can cohere around you and have a better time.”
On which subject, I have to ask. At the height of her Covid-induced delusions, what exactly was her beef with Gene Kelly? She laughs. “Oh, that he swept through dance in this muscular way and was like: dance teachers are too feminine, and I’m going to bring masculinity into the world of dance!” This is the joy of a Lockwood rant; a wild jag jumping off from a kernel of truth. During her Covid collapse, the real measure of how far she had drifted from common reality wasn’t Gene Kelly or Joyce Carol Oates but another insidious, heretical thought. She whispers it: “Maybe Meryl Streep isn’t as good as people are saying?” My hand flies to my mouth. “Right? What is a human being if we don’t believe that Meryl Streep can accurately convey a character? Like, where even are you?” Her eyes widen with shock and amusement. “Out of the world.”
• Will There Ever Be Another You by Patricia Lockwood is published by Bloomsbury. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
