Selfish and Exhausted

On Patricia Lockwood’s ‘Will There Ever Be Another You’

Jackson Pollock, The Moon Woman, 1942, Oil on canvas

To be fair, it’s not like Patricia Lockwood doesn’t warn us. “I was having a Protagonist Problem,” she declares. “I could not move, or make anything happen.” Of course, by the time the reader of her second novel, Will There Ever Be Another You, reaches this acknowledgement midway through the book, they’re likely already aware of both the “protagonist problem” at the heart of the novel and the failure of Lockwood’s trademark self-referential humor to solve it. Credit to Lockwood for her self-awareness, but the authorial disclaimer is too little, too late.

Will There Ever Be Another You explores a period of severe disorientation in Lockwood’s life. After falling ill in a hotel bathroom, the protagonist, Patricia, feels her mind has begun to unravel: “The weave of her has loosened.” (There is no real difference between the author and the narrator, but to avoid confusion, I’ll use Lockwood for the author and Patricia for the character.) Readers familiar with Lockwood’s writing might imagine she’d be uniquely suited to plumb the depths of her own confusion — her enviably vast employ of sensory allusion, her enthusiasm for the bizarre, and her visceral delight in her own ability to baffle would seem to equip her well to write from a place of disarray.

But the novel, perhaps in its attempt to represent the experience of disorientation, becomes disorienting itself. I struggled, even on my second go at reading it, to make sense of what was going on. That’s not just because of the lack of traditional novelistic convention — though it is loosely plotted and lacks clearly delineated characters — but because, too often, Lockwood’s admittedly incandescent writing fails to attach to anything. Take the opening paragraph:

As soon as she touched down in Scotland, she believed in fairies. No, as soon as the rock and velvet of Inverness rushed up to her where she was falling, a long way through the hagstone hole of a cloud, and she plunged down into the center of the cloud and stayed there. You used to set a child out for them, she thought, and was caught in the arms, and awoke on the green hillside.

I was able, after a few re-readings, to catch the cadence of the second sentence, and to understand that “the arms” are those of the fairies and “the green hillside” is abstract. But the mode of reading I would inevitably slide back into was closer to confused reverie than true comprehension.

I don’t actually think it’s possible, barring a dedicated outline, to keep track of what’s going on in Will There Ever Be Another You. Lockwood also doesn’t seem to want us to; there’s a lack of natural narrative current in the story. Disparate scenes aren’t quite connected, nor are we sure if they’re taking place sequentially (the novel begins at the onset of COVID and ends several years later). This makes reading the novel kind of like wandering through a cloud.

Absent a narrative track for the reader to follow, Lockwood is forced to insert what are, relative to the rest of the text, fairly unsubtle guideposts that signal plot movement has occurred or is about to occur. “Some morning she seemed true, and then she was I; some morning she seemed false, and then she was she,” she writes at the start of the novel, flagging an incoming pronoun swap. “Part I” concludes with a seemingly random epiphany when Patricia meets her infant nephew: looking at him, “Meaning was suddenly hitched to its star.” Later, after Patricia’s husband is discharged from the hospital following emergency surgery, she declares that “the death of his death had been in that room.”

One particularly indulgent section (subtitled “a mushroom diary”) centers on Patricia’s experience on psychedelics. The high gives her back her “old feeling . . . of flowing out of the pen,” but it’s not clear what this means. In the place of explanation is a collection of musings on Anna Karenina: “The Mikhailov chapters are very funny.” And: “How far did I get the first time? I remember Levin gave me trouble.”

This means too that the novel’s resolution — the reconstitution of Patricia’s mind — relies on a device that feels retroactively contrived. At the novel’s end, Patricia and her husband visit the Florida Keys, where she imagines a cryptid (an apocryphal creature like Nessie or Bigfoot) has used its power to fully restore her mind. Her husband asks her to describe the creature. Somewhat conveniently, it provides an explanation for the confusing preceding pages: “He’s not a piece of scenery but the person behind it. Looks like a tangle, but that’s our un-understanding. ALL connections necessary. Not something wrong with the brain. The brain itself.” In his random appearance and self-justifying mystery, the cryptid serves as a bizarre deus ex machina resolution.

Exacerbating the hazy narration is Lockwood’s disinterest in pulling her metaphors down to earth. Lockwood has a gift for imagery, but at times, it becomes a shade too inventive to be effective. At the onset of her illness, she writes: “She felt, like four segments of an orange, the rotation of the world that had brought her here.” I struggled to understand what it would feel like to be four segments of an orange — likely this is a creative way of describing nausea, but that’s only my best guess. Tellingly, Lockwood gently ridicules her own descriptive proclivity to comic effect a few times. Patricia tells her nurse that her symptoms include “being pulled out of the world by her hair.” The nurse asks, we can imagine incredulously, if she means she is dizzy. Later, with a friend who claims to understand her outlandish rendering of her sickness, she writes:

I felt like I could move all my furniture into the whites of her eyes. I felt . . . I stopped, for she was nodding. If I told her that I felt like my blood had been put in capsules and distributed to Halloween stores across the country, she would know what I meant: She was a dancer.

We’re left with the feeling the friend has spoiled the fun: her interlocutor’s bafflement is what gives Lockwood pleasure, and her friend has insisted upon comprehension.

As with the narrative-by-signpost approach, Lockwood sees fit to direct the reader to evaluate the novel by its gestures rather than their realization. “What does this sentence mean to you,” Patricia asks her niece as they study Walter Benjamin: “The more closely you look at a word, the more distantly it looks back?” She emphasizes Benjamin’s theory that the thing that “makes a work of art itself” is its aura. In Lockwood’s eye, the novel’s opaqueness is the source of its mystique. References to fairies, changelings, and cryptids attempt to bestow a gloss of the arcane upon the book, as if, by association, it might be alchemized into something more than the sum of its parts.

The otherworldliness inherent in the effort of writing has long been explored in Lockwood’s work. Her early poetry demonstrates a particular desire to loose meaning itself from the constraint of language and suggests the struggle to wrangle coherence in Will There Ever Be Another You may have been inevitable.

Lockwood’s debut poetry collection, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black, features the poem “When We All Move Away from Here, You’ll See a Clean Square of Paper Where His Picture Hung,” an exploration of the metaphysical condition and suffering of the cartoon character Popeye. Lockwood sees a dilemma in the very ink that depicts him:

His pants are not white, they are empty. His face is not white, it is empty. His

arms are not white, they are empty. When we say “pants, face, arms” what we mean is “where the ink ends and the Rest of him begins,” or “the him that the ink contains.”

Popeye is tortured by the capricious laws of his cartoon universe, and later gives in to animalistic proclivities:

“Popeye” goes hunting and brings down a 12-pointer. He drags the body to a clearing. “Thought bubble, thought bubble,” he says meditatively, and eats the lungs.

A more blatant aversion to the blunting character of words is present in her later poem, “What is the Zoo for What.” If “A fountain is a zoo for water, / the song is a zoo for sound,” Lockwood begins, then:

My voice is a zoo right now for this,

and this paces very much inside it,

it would very much like to escape

and eat hot blood again and go home,

. . .

Zoo is very cruel. Let everything out

And live in the wild. Let it hunt for itself again.

Years later, Will There Ever Be Another You could be read as an experiment in freeing whatever it is in Lockwood’s poem that wants to escape from the “zoo” of her voice. Lockwood wonders if the illness that afflicts her has “passed through the hands of invention or chance . . . the gates of the zoo . . . to land in her squarely, like love!”

Within Lockwood are two competing impulses: one that resists the confinement of language and one that desires to set meaning free with language itself. This tension produces beautiful imagery. Her illness makes her think her veins have gone “skipping off her wrists into the blue currents of air.” Her psychedelic mushrooms are “tiny, woody, perfect, and looked like the child of something.” Her high causes “the hooks and eyes of things begin to sharpen,” and a walk on a beach gets “whiter and whiter in waves, until you could imagine your own bleached knucklebone being used in some future game of chance.”

A shimmering animality runs through her descriptions (reminiscent of the lung-eating Popeye and blood-hungry zoo). But in Will There Ever Be Another You, the competing urges that animate her poetry come unbalanced: Lockwood is too suspicious of the slipperiness of language to integrate her prose in a coherent whole.

What Lockwood describes as an illness also appears as a crisis of faith in the ability of literature itself to make meaning. “I cannot write my pieces,” Patricia considers telling her doctor when he asks what is wrong. Later, she reflects that she has given up poetry because she “could no longer bear . . . the form . . . the drop from one line to another, and the little noun hanging on its own.” The crisis of Will There Ever Be Another You can be said to be her inability to reconcile the competing tensions that have, thus far, animated her work.

Though it seems, on the far side of Will There Ever Be Another You, that Lockwood has regained her sanity, it’s unclear that those tensions have been successfully resolved. She appears to have lost faith in the telos of narrative — the successful integration of the disparate pulses of life.

Patricia says that the “challenge” of writing the book is trying to “find a new style for material reality,” but I’m skeptical that’s what she had in mind the whole time. The “line of poetic logic” is “where none seems to exist,” she writes. But this conviction is simply too convenient, and appears formulated to recast the book’s missteps as intentional.

In Will There Ever Be Another You, Lockwood’s artistic interests and identity are bound up with her philosophical convictions about art in a manner that repels easy evaluation. In the absence of faith in literature’s ability to make meaning, Lockwood has reverted to pure personality.

Writing in the London Review of Books on David Foster Wallace’s uncompleted novel The Pale King, Lockwood admits a “tender partiality” for the work in progress and feeling “electrified by the unfinished novel,” because in it, the author is “still alive, the process was ongoing.” It is therefore unsurprising that she reflects, toward the end of Will There Ever Be Another You, that “the best version” of her work is when “all the components are in a hurricane.” Thus, she wants to “communicate the way it was put together, or the act of putting-togetherness.”

But her debut novel, No One Is Talking About This, demonstrates that Lockwood can complete the act of assembling a novel to greater satisfaction. The first half of the book consists of Lockwood’s characteristically unlaced reflections about shared consciousness online and the absurdity of the internet. But these musings soon lurch to a halt when her pregnant sister learns her child has a rare genetic disease. The effect is akin to Lockwood’s phone being torn out of her hand, and here her genius for imagery and natural openness to unconventional ways of being dispose her uniquely to make meaning of the baby’s short and differently felt life.

Of the baby, she writes:

How she turned so wildly to where the pouring and continuous element was, strained her limbs toward the human sunshine, would fight her way through anything to get there. Different, yes, different. But . . . there was almost no human being so unlike other human beings that it did not know what a kiss was.

No One Is Talking About This, like much of Lockwood’s work, explores the curious ways that the human experience can be distended, but what makes the book successful is its ultimate thesis: the real action — the stuff that really matters — lies beyond that fascinating but ultimately self-interested, self-circling world of the internet.

As Will There Ever Be Another You wore on, I hoped for a similar phone-slapped-out-of-hand moment for Lockwood. But where, in No One Is Talking About This, the birth of her niece is an epiphany, in Will There Ever Be Another You, her husband’s similarly jarring collapse and emergency surgery doesn’t substantively change the shape or direction of the novel.

Lockwood’s enthusiasm for the unreal and resistance to the strictures of form make her wary of sanding off the edges of her writing; in “What Is the Zoo for What,” she speaks fondly of the “happy wagging ends of [her] poems.” But it is the integrated rendering of experiences that gives rise to meaning.

Lockwood shares a kindred fascination with Joyce in the way blow-by-blow perception transfigures the self, and therefore the self’s experience of the world. But Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus doesn’t just wonder at the porousness of himself and the world — how the turn of a sunbeam or the nauseous gray of weak light through a window heartens or curdles his soul. He actively shapes those sensations into something familiar and tangible to the reader. If he didn’t — if the emotional stakes and dank confinements of his world weren’t closely rendered — would we still feel the catch in our throats when he bursts that he is not afraid to make a mistake as long as eternity or longer still?

We would not, and this is the error of Will There Ever Be Another You: by eliding the sensibilities of her audience, she declines to interest us. Despite the vivid force of the author’s personality, the collection of images amounts to little meaning. The pleasure of each funny line or beautifully rendered impression dissipates, rather than builds. Being moved is directional, and Lockwood does not point us to anything.

Of course, Lockwood was the first to say that she is not writing for her readers. In an interview with the Independent, she mentions that while she “wrote [her memoir] Priestdaddy with an audience in mind . . . packaging it for people to consume and read,” when she writes for herself, as in Will There Ever Be Another You, it’s a different ballgame: “I am very formless! . . . I do what I want.”

Despite this bluster, Lockwood seems aware that this particular approach to the novel might have stalled out. The “real novelist,” which Lockwood in her own configuration is not, haunts Will There Ever Be Another You. She writes, comparing herself to an accomplished female novelist, that she “would rather have been an emotional genius, and able to pull people out of air.” But Lockwood can’t help but “turn away from her, the acrylic observer.”

In a review of Finnegans Wake, Clifton Fadiman observed that Joyce’s boosters suggested Joyce sought to “hammer out a verbal vision that destroys space and time.” Fadiman concedes that he was successful, “but since time, space, and the individual are the loci, as it were, of human interest, Joyce is forced to forgo all attempts at appealing to our sensibilities.” Lockwood writes in No One Is Talking About This that “even to a cat, the self was a delicacy beyond any other.” Will There Ever Be Another You falters, if not to the same degree as nigh-unreadable Finnegans Wake, because Lockwood over-indulges her own pleasure in her sense of self.

Perhaps the book is meant to enchant us rather than move us. Slipping into Lockwood’s lyric writing is enjoyable for as long as the language carries you along on its current. But it inevitably leaves you off somewhere.

Admittedly, I am not one of the people who, in Lockwood’s telling, “want not quite to understand something.” (Does any reader really not want to understand the book they’re reading?) But I have the suspicion that the pleasure of the novel’s mysteries are inevitably shallow — they are, of course, solvable. You just have to be Patricia Lockwood.

That’s kind of the crux of the issue: Will There Ever Be Another You is, as Lockwood acknowledges, not written for the reader. It’s written for her.

The autofictive genre has already wound down from its heyday. Shelia Heti wrote How Should a Person Be? 15 years ago, and none of the 2025 Booker nominees could be categorized as autofiction. Perhaps Will There Ever Be Another You is evidence of the thorough exhaustion of the inclination to write, not just singularly about oneself, but for oneself alone, a pitfall that yawns more dangerously for autofiction than any other genre.

When I look up from a book to the world outside of it, I feel dispirited by the meaning-eroding onslaught of online content and media algorithms that disincentivize sustained attention and curiosity and encourage us to believe that our immediate interests and desires are paramount. In light of such stakes, Will There Ever Be Another You’s vision is selfish: averring to help the reader get closer to the experience of another person, it rather affirms the pointlessness of the attempt in itself.

Greta Dieck is an associate editor at The Republic of Letters. She lives in DC and writes the Substack Woodchips.