Patricia Lockwood’s second novel is coming later this year, Elle reports.
Riverhead will publish the poet and novelist’s Will There Ever Be Another You in the fall. The press describes the book as a “vertiginous novel about a woman’s descent into illness and insanity.”
Lockwood made her literary debut in 2012 with the poetry collection Balloon Pop Outlaw Black and followed that up with two years later with another collection, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals. In 2017, she published a memoir, Priestdaddy, which was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and released her first novel, No One Is Talking About This, a Booker Prize finalist and Dylan Thomas Prize winner, in 2021.
Will There Ever Be Another You will follow a young woman whose life is thrown into disarray after she becomes ill during a global pandemic. The novel, Riverhead says, “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, from one of our most original writers.”
Lockwood told Elle that the novel was inspired by her own experience contracting Covid-19 early in the pandemic, an experience she previously wrote about in an essay for the London Review of Books.
“Even in the most cognitively lowered state that I was in, there was something that was still there that was myself,” she told Elle. “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.
Will There Ever Be Another You is scheduled for publication on Sept. 23.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
