Will There Ever Be Another You

Patricia Lockwood has one of the most recognisable voices in contemporary literature; you could tear the cover off any one of her books and still know immediately who had written it. Her exquisite grasp of the pathos and absurdity of modern life is utterly unmistakable, as is the brilliance with which she wields language. The description of the soft drink Irn Bru as ‘a pink electrocution of the tongue’ and ‘RIP to those mice, but I’m different’ can only have come from someone who developed their voice in 140 characters.

Will There Ever Be Another You is a companion to Lockwood’s 2021 novel, No One Is Talking About This, which was shortlisted for both the Booker and Women’s Prizes. Drawn from fragments written down while Lockwood was suffering extreme psychological after-effects of Covid, the author has said she ‘wrote it insane, and edited it sane’. It makes for a wild ride: a fragmented work of autofiction that takes the reader from the Fairy Pools of Scotland where the narrator – unnamed, though her mother calls her Patricia – is grieving the loss of her sister’s child; to London, where she converses with an author named Susanna about taking 10 years to write a book about a man in a maze; to a house on an island, where she experiments with hallucinogenic mushrooms. There’s an extended chapter on Anna Karenina and a tender section about teaching literature to her niece. The protagonist’s illness – the fallibility of her body and her mind – permeates throughout, as does her ability to look sideways at the world and notice the oddities that make life ridiculous. At one point the narrator is being interviewed, ‘I am supposed to be talking about fiction,’ she says. ‘Instead […] I am talking about the real.’ I can’t think of a better way to describe Will There Ever Be Another You.